THUGWIDOW “Goliath’s Twin” C30 (Display)


The DISPLAYSOLO series isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to bring your A Game, and probably a bunch of gear and an attention span that lasts at least fifteen minutes. Because in order to qualify for a DISPLAYSOLO release, you have to have an Olympic-level acumen of music production, able to stretch out compositional ideas to at least fifteen minutes … PER SIDE. That’s right, you don’t get to even do DISPLAYSOLO unless you’ve got 2x unbroken fifteen-minute passages. That weeds out a lot of the riffraff.

Don’t worry about Thugwidow though – the UK producer’s got darkrave chops for days, for miles … er, kilometers, ready to spin propulsive IDM crash courses and separate the has-beens from the can-dos, like a centrifuge separates blood and plasma. (Although I guess you need both of those things.) The strobe-lit title track careens around the scientific equipment it’s encased in, pausing at times to catch its breath and ambient out for a while, just lying in wait, though, for the next bout of hammering rhythm. “Circular Argument” fills side B with its shoegazey breakcore, a manifesto of experimentation with kaleidoscopic movement. Taken together, that’s exactly thirty minutes of flashing euphoria.



--Ryan