It’s the musical equivalent of feeling compelled to look at a disturbing sight: you can’t listen away.
The opening track, “GL Lights”, makes this painfully clear. What sounds like a satanic engine coughing fitfully to life gives way to heavily distorted drums in a dubstep mode, competing for attention with a short sample in a raspy, devil-does-care voice, pre-semantic yet pregnant with incantatory gravitas.
Where I live in the United States, this is the kind of song that might end up on a Halloween playlist, blaring from the front yard of someone who thinks children should confront their fears before begging for treats.
The rest of SickElixir goes just as hard.
Instead of the die-cut beats that dominate so much EDM, the ones on SickElixir sound like hammering a cardboard box, ragged and irregular; drumming fingers on a plastic bottle with the top cut off; or stretching a worn rubber band and letting it snap back.
At times, Blawan’s rhythms recall early Einstürzende Neubauten, minus the metal. Or Mouse on Mars filtered through too much coffee.
It makes sense that South Yorkshire DJ Jamie Roberts picked his stage name from Java Blawan, the brand he drank while at university. This is highly caffeinated music, only achieving a perverse chill when it picks up steam.
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Blawan confessed to being shy, describing himself as a “studio hermit”.
That’s why SickElixir doesn’t sound like anything else out there.
Although learning to make songs using the Eurorack modular synthesiser format was a challenge for Blawan at first, it pays massive dividends in his new album.
“I’m trying to write weird music,” he told Lowe. “That’s basically all I’m good at.”
Experimental musicians often describe themselves along these lines.
What sets Blawan apart is his recognition that peering down into the abyss of self is different from plunging over the edge.
Explaining why, despite making techno music for over a decade, he considers SickElixir to be his first proper album, Blawan declared that “An album should be… an emotional representation of the person. I think techno music is a very linear genre. . . It’s very disconnected from the human. And that’s why it’s so popular in clubs.”
Without dissing the genre in which he made his name, Blawan realised that he needed to move beyond techno to connect fully with his humanity.
Unlike a lot of edgy electronica, Sick Elixir doesn’t turn its back to the dance floor. But instead of making music to get the crowd going, Blawan reverses the flow of energy, achieving the auditory equivalent of motion capture.
On the standout track “Casch”, for example, this rhythmic elasticity reproduces the tension between the unwavering beats that dominate clubs and the way dancers’ bodies are simultaneously behind and ahead of them. In other words, the track communicates the experience of translating music into motion.
Philosophers of language working in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a concept, direction of fit, that helps explain what distinguishes Sick Elixir from the vast majority of EDM.
Most DJs seek to impose their will through music, forcing their world to fit what’s in their mind and, by extension, the technological devices that translate thought into sound. In contrast with this world-to-mind fit, Blawan seems content to make his work mirror the imprecise, disorganised behaviour in the world around him.
In other words, Sick Elixir has the feel of a field recording, even though it’s full of compelling sounds of his own devising.
If these songs were photographs, they would be the sort in which the purported subject is undermined by extraneous details: the distracting diagonals of power lines, a heap of trash partially visible in the corner, a blurry figure in a bright coat walking out of the frame.
The robotic, impersonal quality of techno makes it easy to classify as a form of classicism, even if you don’t picture fluted columns or austere pediments when you hear it.
SickElixir, by contrast, falls squarely on the other side of the aesthetic divide.
Blawan’s compositions are mannered, eccentric, and deliberately chaotic. They demonstrate how the asymmetry and disorder of the Baroque, Romanticism, and Expressionism can inform the creation of electronic music, which, while not standard EDM, is still close enough to the club in spirit to reach dance-minded audiences.
Asked in 2023 what he thinks about the perception of his music, Blawan explained that he makes it primarily for himself. It has to be something he enjoys hearing over and over. But then he offered a counterpoint to that insular mindset, confirming that direction of fit is on his mind.
“You don’t want to, like, totally alienate people. But if my output was a total reflection of what was going on in my mind, I would definitely alienate most people.”
The most disquieting aspect of SickElixir is its use of the human voice. Blawan’s voice, to be precise, since he performs most of the parts himself. Only it doesn’t sound anything like the way he speaks.
Not only do the vocals on the album resist intelligibility, but they also have a monstrous quality. Paradoxically, Blawan gets in touch with the human dimension excluded by techno by channelling something inside him that feels inhuman.
As he told Zane Lowe, SickElixir puts his emotions “on the table, in a different language”. It makes complete sense that he describes this approach as “speaking in tongues”.
This is heady stuff for the world of electronic music, where surfaces are prioritised over what lies beneath. But SickElixir is all the stronger as a result, pointing out a new way of using studio technology as a means of self-expression.
Photograph courtesy of Exit Festival. Published under a Creative Commons license.
