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.