Hudson Mohawke has quite the double life going on. A go-to studio alchemist for US hip-hop and R&B royalty including Kanye West, Drake and Lil Wayne, the 29-year-old Scottish producer – AKA Ross Birchard – is also a purveyor of ear-bleeding electro for longstanding yet cutting-edge UK label Warp.
Mohawke is known as a musical maximalist, which is a polite way of saying that he lumps prodigiously distorted beats on top of each other, as if playing techno Jenga. Heavy sub-bass lines, granite synths and sped-up vocals wrestle for supremacy: it’s fair to say that he is not big on significant pauses.
A nodding silhouette bent over a performance controller and abetted by a live drummer, he dispenses electronic spasms and convulsions at a ferocious lick. The industrial rave music of System is like being scoured with wire wool; the agitated, jittery Goooo, a track Mohawke recorded as one half of trap music side-project TNGHT, leaves you feeling as if your blood has been drained from your veins and replaced by Red Bull.
What do you do to this music? With the exception of a few bass junkies at the front, hardly anybody dances. A rare melody rears its head on Ryderz then is crushed beneath apocalyptic beats, while the skittering Lil Djembe is an aural nervous twitch. On the brutal Scud Books, rave synths screech like synchronised air brakes.
It could be Flying Lotus in a fearful bate, or Aphex Twin trying to go commercial. Just when you think you can’t feel any queasier, Birchard factors Kanye-style chipmunk vocals into the comically abrasive Higher Ground. It’s simultaneously exhilarating and wearying: a tumultuous thrill that you wouldn’t want to experience too many times.
- At the Warehouse Project, Manchester, 11 December. Box office: 0161-835 3500. Then at ABC, Glasgow, 12 December. Box office: 0844-477 2000.
