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Rabit Communion Tri Angle

02.11.15

If you were to attempt to apply a pattern to Rabit’s deliberately indefinable Communion it would most likely be one of call and response. It is a record that throws bursts of chaos, dense thuds, swallowed samples and frenetic, sliced rhythms out in clouds, like black ink, before letting them settle Rorschach-like, in disassembled meaning.

Rabit, real name Eric Burton, has spoken of his inability, or at least reluctance, to label his music. Many have declared it grime, yet the desire to attach a club environment to his work is misguided. Communion exists comfortably alongside the ethos of producers like Lotic or Arca, willing to take the landscape of dance-focused electronic music, but happier still to remove its functionalities and repurpose its materials to achieve commentary or abstract reflection.

When Communion is at its most successful, it is able to marry these two, offering enough in the way of natural attractiveness to allow automatic engagement, while continuing to challenge and comment. During the best examples of this, double header Burnerz and Glass Harp Interlude for instance, Burton proves himself an emerging master of dark adventurism. Blending seductive, yet aggressive, production with enough doubt and poignancy for the assaults to sink in.

The danger, as with many of his contemporaries, is that the abrasiveness distracts from the truth. The meaning may end up lost on many who have been drawn to his work by its brute force, or sheer noise — many of the album’s weakest, or at least most vague, moments are its loudest. This is a record that finds its real power in the space between attacks. The echoes after the fact. It is a communion between violence and thought.