Shackleton Comes Back to the Floor

For most of the last decade, a new Shackleton record meant settling in. There were spoken-word pieces, collaborations with singers and poets, and long-form works issued as lavish box sets meant for home listening. Euphoria Bound, released January 30 on the London label AD 93, is something else: ten tracks, none much over six minutes, aimed back at a room full of people moving (Bandcamp; Resident Advisor). It is the most useful way into one of the strangest catalogues in British electronic music, and it landed with far less noise than it deserved.

Where he came from

Sam Arthur Shackleton grew up in Lancashire and came up in the mid-2000s, co-founding the label Skull Disco with Appleblim. His debut album, Three EPs, came out on Perlon in 2009, followed in 2010 by a fabric 55 mix and the launch of his own imprint, Woe to the Septic Heart! He relocated to Berlin in 2008 (Wikipedia)). Those late-2000s records are where his reputation still rests: rolling hand drums, basslines that zig-zag rather than pulse, and kicks that drift in and out of the grid (Resident Advisor).

What followed was a long turn away from the club. He made Devotional Songs with the singer Ernesto Tomasini in 2016, Behind the Glass with Anika in 2017, and Primal Forms with Zimpel in 2020 (Wikipedia)). His last solo album, The Scandal of Time (2023), was slow and organic, a record Oli Warwick, writing at First Floor, calls a career highlight (First Floor).

A new home

AD 93 is a London label run by Nic Tasker and founded in 2014 (Resident Advisor). It is a sensible fit: a label that treats club music and experimental music as one conversation. The release is handsome without being precious, a double LP mastered and cut by Rashad Becker with artwork by Strawalde (Bandcamp). Becker's involvement matters. Shackleton's music lives in its low end and in the space between drum hits, and the vinyl cut has to carry both.

What it sounds like

The label copy promises a record "more direct than recent releases," and for once the copy is accurate (Bandcamp). Andrew Ryce's review at Resident Advisor walks through it in detail (Resident Advisor):

• "Philistine Wavelength" pans sounds across the stereo field until the bass finally surfaces from underneath.
• "Contagious Illusions" stacks hypnotic percussion under dub techno chords and an eerie piano.
• "Crushing Realities" is ritual drumming with real menace; First Floor singles out its tough snare (First Floor).
• "The Unbeliever's Pulse" is a syncopated 2-step track that RA ties to Zed Bias's early-2000s Phuturistix work, and the closest Shackleton has come to a DJ tool in years.
• "When Memory Ceases" breaks into drum freakouts and jazzy keys that lean toward early Krautrock.

Elsewhere, the looped voices on "The Soul of Everything" turn apocalyptic, and "The Past Awakening" brings back the interlocking patterns of his late-2000s twelve-inches. What the record leaves out tells you as much: Ryce notes there are no 13-minute tracks and no extended vocal collaborations (Resident Advisor). The sounds that once read as borrowed from Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian music now just sound like Shackleton.

"Merciless, but breathtaking." Andrew Ryce, Resident Advisor

Why it matters now

The album arrives in a busy stretch. Warwick lists recent work with Holy Tongue, Six Organs of Admittance and DJ Scotch Rolex, plus a remix for Wacław Zimpel (First Floor). A producer this active could easily have made another sprawling home-listening suite. Instead he wrote ten tight tracks that a DJ can actually play, without sanding off anything that makes him difficult.

That is the record's real achievement. Plenty of veteran producers "return to the dance floor" by simplifying. Shackleton returns by making the rhythm itself the strange part: a kick that slips, a snare that lands late, a bassline that seems to change direction mid-bar. The mood is bleak. Ryce hears little hope in it, only an endless cycle of renewal and destruction (Resident Advisor). But it moves, and it rewards the volume of a proper system.

Reception has not been unanimous in its warmth. The Playground scored it a 7, praising the opener "Elemental Dream" and the 2-step of "The Unbeliever's Pulse" while finding the album deliberately disorienting (The Playground). Fair enough. Euphoria Bound is not a comfortable listen. It is, though, the clearest statement in years from a producer who has never sounded like anyone else, and the best place to start if his name has only ever been a rumour to you.