About

It speaks to the speed of Brian Leeds' development that by the time The Guardian heard of "outsider house" he'd long since left the reductive descriptor behind. While that term might have applied to earlier releases like Aphelia's Theme on Future Times or R.E.G.A.L.I.A for Anthony Naples' Proibito label (as Royal Crown Of Sweden), the Kansas native's first full-length has very little to do with house music on the surface. Sure, there is often a 4/4 pulse and there are even recognizable, semi-danceable drum beats, but Colonial Patterns skews a lot closer to ambient sound collage than anything you're likely to hear in a club.

The album's overall mood is drowsy and tempos are suitably slow. Almost every texture is robbed of its lustre, and melodies languish in dusty, half-finished states. While so much of today's gritty beat experiments feel urban, Colonial Patterns feels rural, like a sort of corrupted pastoral. Tracks like "Anagramme Of My Love" and "Chun-Kee Player" are purely abstract constructions, but with strange grooves hidden in the clouds of crackle and hiss. "Ragtime U.S.A. (Warning)" chugs along at a quickened pace, its one-bar bassline looping into infinity. The whole thing almost takes off when the kick drops back in for the last section, but instead it drifts to a close. "Skug Commune" is similar, built on a persistent head-nodding groove that doesn't really need to go anywhere to be effective. The textural detail is immaculate: each track is exactly as washed out and strange as Leeds wants it to be. As loose as they are, they feel well-crafted and well-mixed.

As a collection of tracks made from short loops and otherworldly samples, Colonial Patterns is an easy fit for Oneohtrix Point Never's label, Software Records. Indeed, the fingerprint of Daniel Lopatin's own work is hard to miss, especially on tracks like "Quivira" or "Prinzif." There is a similarity in the mood, in the wasted, empty weirdness of the tracks. At almost an hour in length, the album does lag a bit in places, but by the time the beautiful, shining tones of "Angel Phase" have faded into the ether, all is forgiven. Colonial Patterns is not a flawless record, but it does open up a whole new world of possibilities for Leeds as a producer, and places him decisively outside any box people might wish to put him in.  — (via Resident Advisor)

Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ impressive debut album as Huerco S follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes. Filtering his work through yesterday’s technology, he makes techno folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future.

Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away. Read it one way and it's an allusion to the arrogance that nations are doomed to repeat. Glance again and it conjures up the lines that such behavior razes, replaces, and retraces on the land. Both readings reverberate throughout Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ debut album as Huerco S. It follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes on exemplary small labels from both sides of the Atlantic-- including Opal Tapes and Future Times-- and sounds like the work of an artist hitting his stride, rather than one making his first big statement.

Leeds’ focus is the hidden histories of his homeland in the American midwest. He signposts as much with titles like “Quivira” named for a mythical place “discovered” by a Spanish explorer in the 16th century, “Canticoy”, a word of Native American origin that means a lively social gathering, and “Monks Mound (Arcology)”, which is an ancient earthwork in Illinois. References aside, his music is heavy with layers, symbols, and signals. Form wise, he takes futurism’s theme tune-- techno-- and filters it through yesterday’s technology: cassettes, synths, and cheap software. The ensuing collision of temporal zones creates a bewildering, all-encompassing present, which might be why Colonial Patterns presents a soundtrack for both blunting jet lag and long road trips in which the landscape is continuously cut and framed by the windshield window.

“Plucked from the Ground, Toward the Sun” moves like cloud formations, calling to mind school science classes and the water cycle chart that detailed water’s cyclic shapeshifting from evaporation to precipitation. “Skug Commune” sounds like a forgotten quiet storm song trying to break through a broken transistor radio, or a conversation half lost down a faulty line, while the raw metallic percussion of “Quivira” evokes an image of acid rain falling on aluminum cutlery.

There are a number of contrasts and conflicts between the natural and manmade world. “'Iińzhiid” laps and rolls like water, its rhythms reflecting and refracting into an infinite horizon. On “Struck with Deer Lungs”, the circling sub-bass turns with the exhausted pallor of an ancient ceiling fan. Lead single “Prinzif” is weighted with a creeping anxiety that smacks of Twin Peaks, a not-so unusual relationship when you consider the cult TV show is probably the most successful illustration of contemporary culture’s fear of the ancient/(super)natural and modern/manmade worlds colliding.

Of course, Colonial Patterns does not exist in a vacuum. There is dialogue with Actress and Laurel Halo’s handling of techno as a form not immune to time, one that can disintegrate just like the vast metropolises that inspired it, leaving fragments that distill into something new once again. Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica and Forest Swords’ Engravings are also relatives, for their exploration of the nature of memory and excavation of history respectively. Like his contemporaries, Huerco S. seeks to unearth new languages-- trace new patterns-- within established musical world orders. In his hands, techno is a folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. The final track “Angel (Phase)” is both culmination and affirmation of his archaeological digs: a vision of an ancient ambient techno gathering bathed in campfire light and dreaming into the night. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: Software
Format:2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, 
Country: 2013
Genre: Electronic
Style: Lo-Fi, Experimental, House, Techno
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