Although the compositions of this Edinburgh artist, whose real name is Joe Powers, may seem too off-kilter to fit into a standard DJ set, they are still imbued with the spirit of the club.
That’s even more true for his new Exchequer EP than it was for his 2021 record Siren Spine Sysex, which was nominated for Scottish album of the year.
The musician attracted the attention of Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman as a teenager. But if that label’s best-known artist, Burial, makes music that communicates a sense of melancholy belatedness—“after the rave”, as Mark Fisher famously put it—the songs of Proc Fiskal pulse with the excitement of things to come.
On the opening track “ADDICTIONZ”, synth arpeggios shimmer like a mirage on the horizon, barely holding their shape. They have a cleaner sound on “O’SALLEEE”, reinforced by artificial strings, yet still promise a strange deliverance, with forceful bass notes that recall Detroit legend, Carl Craig.
The final track, “she’s veiled,” begins in a more stately fashion, with plucked and bowed notes suggesting that the conflict between electronic and acoustic instrumentation lies more in the head than in the heart.
But it’s “Disease Again” that best conveys what makes Proc Fiskal special. Between sliced-up vocal samples, an irregular rhythm that picks up momentum like a runaway cart careening downhill, and a swelling array of granular eccentricities that would confound all but the most confident dancers, this standout song conjures a vision of a world in which the grim industrial landscapes of techno have been magically transformed into overgrown meadows.
It’s not Proc Fiskal’s music that is responsible for our lack of ease, but the cultural programming that makes us prefer security over freedom.
Instead of the predictability associated with mainstream EDM, the tracks on Exchequer convey how people interact at a rave, doing their own thing, but doing it together.
As I immersed myself in this strange, wonderful music, I kept thinking of a scene in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, in which his protagonist Oedipa Maas returns to her Berkeley, California hotel, only to get swept onto the dance floor at a convention for deaf mutes.
“Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop.” But despite the disabilities that wall the participants off from each other, they never collide.
“The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easily, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense.”
This remarkable spectacle, which only Oedipa can see, is another one of the “anarchist miracles” she encounters in her adventures as an accidental gumshoe.
Writing shortly before the counterculture would explode into mainstream consciousness, Pynchon served as its ironic herald, blowing his muted trumpet to warn the squares of postwar American society that they would no longer be able to go through the motions of everyday life with their assumptions unchallenged.
Sixty years later, Proc Fiskal seems intent on foretelling an analogous revelation, even as the world seems to be heading rapidly in the opposite direction.
Interviewed by Crack Magazine in 2021 about Siren Spine Sysex, which features an ironic send-up of traditional Scottish music, Fiskal offered a stinging critique of the folk music revival that emerged from the counterculture.
“It was honest music, but they were making it in the 60s, which was a really futuristic time period. It was out of place.”
Although he grew up in a musical family and had relatives in that scene, Fiskal cannot abide the way participants turned their backs on the future.
“It just smells horrible, that earnest folk guitar thing,” he explained, taking particular issue with the way people would “dress like medieval peasants and act all feudal”.
In other words, if your idea of progress is regressing to the Middle Ages, then you are not offering a serious alternative to the modern status quo.
The problem isn’t the music, however, but the conceptual framework in which it’s deployed.
While there are certainly aspects of Proc Fiskal’s music that call previous decades to mind—I hear a lot of late 1980s in his manipulation of synthetic instruments—they aren’t meant to inspire a longing for a brighter past but a better future.
That’s why it matters that his music appears on Hyperdub, a label identified—perhaps unfairly—with a dismal mindset.
Above all else, Exchequer is a buoyant record, inspiring optimism at a time when our reservoirs of hope are running perilously dry.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
