Robot Dance
ROBOT DANCEA Blunted Robots label showcase featuring:
BRACKLES
SHORTSTUFF
MARTIN KEMP
MARTIN KEMP
MICKEY PIERCE
9-2. £5 ADV
Blunted Robots - the collective of Brackles, his brother Martin Kemp, Shortstuff [above] and Mickey Pearce - are making dubstep that’s disorientating, psychedelic and dripping in colour and imagination. Most people’s first taste of Blunted Robots was ‘Glazed’, Brackles‘ debut 12″ on Berkane Sol, but although that record was a great reflection of their fun-comes-first approach to a genre that’s always catered to really dull people, it bears little resemblance to the collective’s current sound. Brackles’ recent 12″ for Apple Pips, ‘Get A Job’/'Lizards’, is full of squiggly lines that seem to criss-cross in every direction at once, constantly shifting key and changing direction. It’s like playing Wipeout or something. ‘LHC’, his 12″ for Planet Mu is on a similar tip, while his and Shortstuff’s collaboration on the B-side, ‘Sutorîtâ Faitâ’ (Street Fighter in Japanese), is like watching a robot with a limp try to sprint, or trying to replicate 2step while overheating: odd kicks hang back, synths fizz in the background when you least expect them, pitched-down vocals die in front of you.
As for the label aesthetic, which includes a Blunted Robots comic strip, designed by Wigflex boss and Nottingham bass lynchpin Spamchop, that will gradually develop over the course of the 12″s (”we’re not gonna make money at first, so we’re keen on building an identity and making something collectable”), “it boils down to…Well, I guess we always make our stuff a little bit silly. People take themselves too seriously. There’s echoes of Todd Edwards; that slightly silly vibe. We came up with the name when driving down to meet ST Holdings: we heard ‘No Charisma’ being played on one of the Ruffage Sessions, and MC Asbo said it ’sounded like some sort of tribal robot.’ We combined that with the whole Madlib/Quasimoto thing - stay blunted and that - and we had Blunted Robots. It sounds a bit like tribal robots, it sounds a bit like broken robots…”
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