Daniel Avery delivers the best album of his career.
One of the most brain-bending qualities electronic music has – it’s impossible to offer a catch-all definition of the thing beneath 500 words, so we won’t try – is the constant pattern of evolution.
At one end of the spectrum, any DJ’s job is the same – to get people dancing, but cratered by nano-genres, blighted by the pandemic and over-shadowed by the past, the art of doing so now feels like a completely open field.
Daniel Avery has spent much of the time since releasing his first album Drone Logic almost a decade ago as a reluctant pioneer following modest origins in the retirement haven of Bournemouth.
After relocating to London, he wound up collaborating with maverick producer Andrew Weatherall and grabbing a prestigious residency at Fabric. His output has touched many of the movement’s cornerstones, never settling anywhere for long.
Daniel Avery’s last two releases – Love + Light and Together In Static – were made during the physical and mental confines of lockdown, but Ultra Truth marks a pronounced breakout. Deliberately messy, flawed and imperfect, this new precept was to make Human Touch, ‘sound like it was on fire’.
Creating a sense of decay in a musical form that’s prone to accusations of being too mechanical and robotic always requires dexterity and imagination. Opener New Faith begins with a naked piano loop which, as the track goes deeper, then begins to distort and smear like a face once seen in a dream after waking.
This salute to being alive is conscious, Avery acknowledging that the escapism of his past work has now been swapped for dropping head-first into the confrontational spawn of modern existence.
On the journey as well are a host of A-List collaborators – including HAAi, SHERELLE and Kelly Lee Owens – along with co-production from Ghost Culture and Manni Dee.
One other guest though appears from a long, long way away. Lone Swordsman debuted shortly after Daniel Avery’s former mentor Weatherall’s passing, but it’s here that the track finds a permanent home, the simple lead and melancholy undercurrent a tribute and nod to the barrier-crossing esteem in which he was held by so many.
Again, a possible reflection of its creator’s newfound self, there’s less cohesion to these tracks, more a keenness to go wherever mood and creativity might lead.
This delivers the listener into what is a dazzlingly eclectic rollercoaster of styles, from the Balearic, trance-like Wall Of Sleep to the unforgiving techno bludgeon of Devotion, the latter imparting ecstasy and alien strobe heat back-to-back like they’re in a fight against dancefloor ghosts.
In this microcosm of transcendence, time ceases to matter. Here the icy, heavy-lidded breaks of Near Perfect pass through a wormhole straight into Higher, five minutes of turbocharged atmospheric drum and bass that conjures up its heat and energy near perfectly.
These are spaces filled with risk, but equally which overflow with a kind of unspoken optimism; closer Heavy Rain oscillates joyously, Collapsing Sky sounds it was taken directly from one of Warp’s legendary Artificial Intelligence compilations, whilst the disembodied vocals of Only speak to Aphex Twin’s worshipped ambient tracts of a similar time.
Ultra Truth is Daniel Avery’s best album to-date, a remarkable trick given his near flawless history. Not only that, but it’s also comfortably so, the synthesis of a master now working at another level, painting sounds, dripping colour and noise into stunning abstracts.
It’s the end result of a process of personal evolution but, critically, one of revolution too.
