The Swedish duo continues to find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon.
Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH’s music is relentlessly focused. The two musicians are largely anonymous: They rarely give interviews and choose instead to hide behind codes, anagrams, and indecipherable patterns in their album names and track titles. Although techno at its roots, their music also carefully folds in elements of IDM and more experimental forms.
Since their debut EP, in 2012, SHXCXCHCXSH have generally been slotted alongside artists like Ancient Methods, Rrose, or their Avian labelmates Gunver Ryberg and Pris. They share with their peers a take on techno that is brooding, bleak, and sometimes sorrowful. But SHXCXCHCXSH’s work stands apart. In addition to their anonymity and code-like sequences, they seem to purposefully make themselves hard to decipher. The sound design is sprawling, temperamental, and alive. There are no unnecessary repetitions or generic motifs; their music may channel club culture’s hedonism, but it carries a carefully thought-out nucleus at its core.
On Kongestion, their signature textural depths accompany some of their heaviest productions to date. Their sounds are unusually harsh across the seven-song EP, frequently invoking the doomy sounds of Second Phase’s 1991 classic “Mentasm.” On opener “Kong,” jagged synths rain down over staggered, distorted kick drums, and the siren-like sound reappears on “Onge” and “Nges.” “Gest” is even more dystopian, streaked with grinding, buzzing sounds that are almost unpleasant to listen to, though the relentless drums balance out the synths’ erratic bursts, pulling you under the music’s spell.
Something about the way that Kongestion’s synth riffs tend to bubble under the surface, capped by frothing white noise, gives the impression of being underwater, which makes experiencing the record in a club context an intoxicating prospect. Yet despite this aquatic feel, the atmosphere remains heavily industrial: Their rhythms lurch like lumbering behemoths assembled from battered scraps, and many of their patterns feel like accidents caught on tape. The music’s deconstructed air extends to the fact that all seven tracks feel like remixes of the same source material.
Still, however brutal Kongestion may be, it’s consistently hypnotic, whether on juggernauts like “Tion” or the foggy “Stio.” The latter is the EP’s softest track, yet it still feels ready to crumble to pieces. On Kongestion, SHXCXCHCXSH consistently find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon, stoking the tension between chaos and control.
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