Side A 2 – Empire of Glass (Dead Fader remix)
The Berlin-based noise/bass maestro Dead Fader has caused all sorts of sonic mayhem since their first album Corrupt my Examiner (3 by 3 music) and more recently the Luckeey EP on Tigerbeat 6. Hooking up with Combat via Discordance and Sub FM, it might surprise fans that Dead Fader also has a melodic side, and very good it is too. Some of that is visible here with a long, lush intro and lush improvised melodies that almost lull you into a sense of comfort and cushion you before the trademark Dead Fader beats crunch in with speaker-destroying force.

Side B 1 – Empire of Glass (Plaid remix)

Emerging from the release of their Scintilli album on Warp, the musical legends Plaid should need absolutely no introduction, really. We’re really proud that they agreed to remix for us, and even happier that it’s no less that a Plaid acid track, masterfully built and reminiscent of their 303-drenched Psil-Cosyin from their Spanners and Peel Sessions albums. The Black Dog and Plaid have heavily influenced Combat since the 90’s, with their own forward-thinking take on electronic music, applying their unpredictable melodies and shifting beats to push electro and techno into entirely new sonic territories.

Side B 2 – Empire of Light (Subjex remix)

Subjex is the production incarnation of Matthieu Debliqui from Lille, France. Subjex’s warped sonics first came to our attention via a 10” on Planet Mu, and later releases via Somia, Combine, Schematic, and (soon) Detroit Underground. He also runs his own imprints Bedroom Research and In Vitro Recordings.

The sound of Subjex is hard to pin down, as diverse as it is precise, swinging from dubby hip hop to pounding hi-tech dubstep to searing acid electro breakbeats, and that’s just for starters. What’s unique though is his ability to apply precision sound design to smash up the dancefloors, as proven by “Maneken Acid“which was championed by Rob Hall and Stormfield. Subjex’s production style is typified by spending ages laboriously working and reworking material until all sounds are interconnected on most tunes, with melodies generated by the beats themselves.

Here he reworks Anodyne’s Empire of Light into an epic charging beast of a track, colossal kickdrums and snarling bleeps like a giant robot gone mad, flattening whole cities before letting Anodyne’s strings infuse the space in the 2nd half of the track.

“Cloughley (Anodyne) may have been absent from the scene for more than a decade, but his return is strangely timely; the Anodyne sound, while drawing on the sonic tropes of the 90s, finds touchstones with the searing industrial techno of the Downwards camp and the paranoiac bass pressure of dubstep’s more screwfaced exponents. Not to mention his being embraced by the establishment figures he clearly admires, from Rob Hall of Skam to Warp stalwarts Autechre, Plaid and The Black Dog. – Angus Finlayson, The Quietus”