Hagop Tchaparian may be a new name to electronic music fans but has been behind the scenes, or in different guises, for some time. Scan the tracklisting for Hot Chip’s 2006 breakthrough The Warning and his surname is right there at number six – a tribute, perhaps, to the period in which he was the group’s tour manager. Before that he was a guitarist in pop-punkers Symposium. After they split in 2000, some went on to form other rock bands, while Tchaparian contributed to a compilation on which artists reflected on their Armenian heritage and mixed up traditional sounds with contemporary beats.
It’s a spirit he has maintained more than two decades later with his debut album, Bolts. Signed to Kieran Hebden AKA Four Tet’s Text Records, it’s rooted in grit-flecked, lambent electronics while weaving together field recordings from Tchaparian’s travels: drummers accompanying a fire-jumping ritual at an Armenian wedding; street musicians playing the Arabic harp called a qanun; gravel underfoot.
Sometimes this sort of exploratory folk-dance can sound tacked together, but not here: Bolts has the freewheeling energy of a skateboarder careening around London’s South Bank (as Tchaparian would do as a boy). Nor is it what might have once been called “chillout”. Sure, there are moments of soft, textured afterglow, but Tchaparian’s secret weapon is volcanic eruption: on tracks such as Right to Riot and Flame, dhol drums and a Turkish woodwind instrument called the zurna – like a bagpipe in its boisterous majesty – create ritualistic, unpreened techno that sounds as if it’s from a fourth dimension.
Bolts is out on now on Text Records
