TVO/The Village Orchestra, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Broken20)

I was saddened earlier this year to hear about the imminent winding down of the excellent Highpoint Lowlife, a label which succeeded in straddling the boundaries between genres such as techno, drone, glitch and even hip-hop, thanks to some high quality control and high calibre personnel. Thankfully, out of those ashes, something new is rising. A number of those associated with that label have reconvened around a new flag: Broken20. Curated by TVO/The Village Orchestra’s Ruaridh Law, with assistance from fellow Scots Dave Fyans (Erstlaub) and Dave Donnelly (Production Unit), Broken 20 also aims to ignore genre barriers in its voyage into “decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz” (you can imagine how my ears pricked up when I heard that particular description). After some (in both senses) buzz-building downloadable mixes from the likes of Erstlaub and Highpoint Lowlife’s Thorsten Sideb0ard, the Broken20 label has now issued its first proper statement: and what a powerful statement it is.

Ruaridh Law has opted to open Broken20 for business with a huge set which really sets out the label’s stall. He showcases both sides of his split personality here – the dense, dark sonic explorations of his The Village Orchestra guise occupying the first hour, and TVO the DJ getting the next 35 minutes. That one The Village Orchestra track alone more than justifies any entry fee he could care to charge. For a Manchester event entitled “Memories Are Brighter Than Our Digital Debris”, Law improvised a set which drew together degraded sounds, musical samples, field recordings and spoken word, blending them all together into a set which mused on the impermanence of both recorded music and memory. As you can imagine, this takes him deep into territory more commonly-associated with the likes of William Basinski, The Caretaker, and Philip Jeck, but he gives it his own idiosyncratic twists, working on glitchy rhythms which seem to fracture and collapse, splinters mixing into the grainy layers of sound.

It builds quietly, electrical hum and flapping tape sounds underpinning slow melodic progressions, before the voices start: a variety of people talking about their memories. Halfway in, there is a gloriously evocative moment when a crackly, swelling choral interlude coincides with a woman (Law’s mother, perhaps?) talking about her childhood on Skye, the music being gradually chopped and shredded while a child laughs and waves lap on the shore. It takes a more rhythmic turn thereafter, but retains the dark, grainy ambience, with whine and distortion eating into the skitterish patterns, leading the listener through the dark to the dancefloor for the TVO tracks.

With these, Law strips out the extraneous material to focus purely on the cutting-edge rhythms. Three of these pieces are masterclasses in building up minimal techno tracks, the gaps between the clicks and pulses gradually becoming infilled with a lush ambience, while the other, “Wasted Memory”, is as good as anything Law has produced under this moniker, slashing the listener with razor sharp beats, tending their wounds with soft keyboard melodies. It is clear that with We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Law is reaching not just into the past, but showing us his own vision of the future. It looks like Broken20 will be a very big part of that future.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale will be released for digital download and on DVD-R soon. Ruaridh’s website has a few Vimeo clips from the “Memories Are Brighter Than Our Digital Debris” Manchester event, such as the one below.

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