With a deeply idiosyncratic career, Sam Shackleton has been mapping out new scenarios and configurations for today’s electronica. An agitator in the way he thinks about and recreates Jamaican musical heritage, he was one of the pioneers of dubstep. He took the genre to unthinkable latitudes, dismantling and expanding its genetic structure like an alchemist’s labour. Even today, nobody sounds like Shackleton; in defence of this, we can evoke the wonderful exploration of nuances, recall the sonic palette he developed or simply point out the infinite curiosity that characterises him as an artist. Together with Laurie Osbourne, he founded the brilliant Skull Disco, a small but influential label whose releases quickly became historical documents. These documents are accompanied by an extensive and unlikely discography, both in his own name and in collaborative format. All told, it’s been almost two decades in which he has continued to melt the stylistic boundaries of contemporary music – and the spectrum is already relatively immeasurable.
His obsession with the liminal spaces of things gives him an almost quantum understanding of timbres, harmonic notions and a very rich and changing rhythmic lexicon. Nevertheless, there is a certain organic quality to his albums that connects him with the substance ‘beyond the visible’. In perhaps his most ambitious album to date, Music for a Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ Eps continues, years later, to transport us far and wide. Imagined places, some even hidden, whose ability to uplift is real. A rare digital hypnosis of voices, pulsations and esoteric elements. In the subsequent Devotional Songs and Behind the Glass, he expanded these notions into longer themes – and definitely into another solar system. In recent years he has signed a batch of incredible albums recorded with Waclaw Zimpel, Takumi Motokawa and Heather Leigh. This year, and still in the form of collaborations, he surprised the world with two elegant works with Ben Chasny aka Six Organs of Admittance and Valentina Magaletti’s Holy Tongue. Perhaps never before have we had this experienced and holistically proportioned view that Shackleton is an epicentre and energy magnet for profanely sacred music. Each disc seems to me to be a kind of masterclass, without knowing exactly what we’re going to – but knowing that we have to go. NA
