Fact Mix 795: Perko
Fact Mix 795: Perko
A set of heady, percussive techno and club music from the Scottish producer.
Perko’s NV Auto, released on Numbers in 2018, saw the Scottish-born, Copenhagen-based producer land with one of the most impressive debuts in the label’s catalogue. It combined the rhythm and tempo of UK garage with dub chords and ambient techno moods, linking the sound of ’90s chillout rooms to the post-dubstep experimentation of the late ’00s.
On 2020’s The City Rings, Perko took his stylistic explorations further with a set of tracks that referenced electro and dubstep, in a style that recalled the hazy yet propulsive sounds of the Acido and SUED labels. What characterises all of Perko’s music however, whether it’s 140BPM club cuts or beatless interludes, is his use of field recordings, Space Echo and subtle layers that shift underneath the surface.
Some Kind of Peace. We wish. Clearly fate took an ironic opportunity to intervene shortly before we had a chance to talk to him about both the new album and his approach to creativity more broadly: an earthquake shook Iceland right before this interview took place, prompting Ãlafurâs opening exclamation of, âThereâs a lot of energy in my body right now!â
Thatâs true, of course, for all sorts of reasons. Having reimagined the piano with his remarkable, semi-generative Stratus instrument, which has been exquisitely sampled and captured by Spitfire Audio, Ãlafur sought to follow his 2018 LP
Re:member with a record that represents a sea change in how this musical perfectionist has decided to approach life. His aim? To let his guard down. Here, we press Ãlafur on what spurred such an approach and how he achieves his unique sound.
Fact 2020: Live
Fact 2020: Live
This year, the world’s dancefloors, venues and festivals largely went quiet in the face of a global pandemic.
Despite all this, artists, festivals and clubs did everything they could to keep the music alive, adapting to a socially distanced world with livestreams, remote festivals and filmed performances that responded to the COVID-19 era.
Festivals such as Unsound and Semibreve turned their IRL festivals into communal online events, while Refraction Festival created an entirely new concept to being live music to people’s homes. We began a new series, Fact Live, in which we invited artists to film sessions at 180 The Strand.
. and when you say space the silence how difficult is it then to transform that into music when you say you put a very long reverberations on the side and you think god that side so spacey you know they ve been all these devices in the history of music called space echo and space chamber but of course it space there s no echo. there s no sound so so we ve created a human fantasy about what space is like and all that we know is that it s very big . i started to think that composing making music i should say was such an unusually human function so we d. i do this thing called making music for quite mysterious reasons i think and i think one of the reasons is it s