Ireland's top industrial techno label keeps accumulating new talents. This time the choice of recruitment fell on Jan Boland a.k.a. Swardz, a self-taught musician from Dublin whose previous free-download two-tracker Antennas falls well within the sound established on Variance—which might've been the catalyst of her appearance on the label. To jump ahead a little, the fifteenth release on Variance is nothing if not a promising debut backed by label's head operative Luke Creed, disguised as Scenedrone, and the one that could put Swardz on a map of a bigger scale.

    Rough-hewn, 130 BPM grinder Broken Files starts off with low-seated 4/4 kicks, syncopated wooden percussion, drained-out shakers, hissing and short 4/4 hats, arpeggiated, groovy synths, and just the kind of messed up vocal bits that the playful disfigured nightmare creatures emanate, before they start chewing on your face and leave you savoring this experience in cold sweat for the rest of the night, as you are trying to comfort yourself by leaving all the lights on and holding on to the thought that monsters aren't real. Lavender Salad elevates 5 BPM points up, noticeably hardening the kicks, bringing up stutters of metallic clanging, painstakingly distorted claps, asynchronously ticking, tin bars that box up the more linear rhythms of other elements, and sandy loops, that show up towards the end and neatly condense the spectrum; highly recommended as a soundtrack for some quality-time salad tossing at the kitchen. Prescott speeds up all the way to 143 BPM, making use of thudding 4/4 kicks that by times go rogue and get quadrupled, intensifying the already tense, rave-oriented nature of the composition; expect volumes of acid spillages, speeding, soft noise-shaped bands at 16/16, dense, sandy 4/4 hats and properly filtered, screamo vocals, which fit perfectly with the rest of the elements. Scenedrone's vision of Broken Files is a bass greedy, basement-aimed 134 BPM bastard that puts the subwoofers to a good use, utilizing the capacity of row ranges to their fullest; its Goliath kicks run their designated earth-quaking agenda under the pitch-lowered vocals, 16/16 shakers, slashing 4/4 hats and wooden percussion, which now sounds threatening rather than groovy. The files are broken for good, system restoration won't have any effect here.

Release Type: EP

Release Date: 7 February 2017

Release Format: Digital

Record Label • Catalog: Variance • VAR015

Purchase Links: Beatport • Junodownload • Bandcamp