- Nothing if not prolific, nothing if not always changing it up, nothing if not following his own beat, repurposing the musical sounds of the world into part of his slightly intimidating collage of noise: this is Enderie. He's probably best known for his work as Cured Pink (or part of it), which can be vaguely, messily circumscribed with the description dub-noise-rock (??). What must run a close second in notoriety, are his very regular forays into the world of dance music. Enderie's three recent EPs, all on different labels, all featuring different, bent takes on the world of beats, all came out in the last three years. There are a bunch of other projects too, even in that period of time, and god knows how I would sum up the work of all the flailing tendrils of this endlessly curious mind. Even his most recent, 3, released by stylish little Melbourne label Anterograde, is, in each track, an exploration of a different genre. If it can be summed up in one dance-music cliche (it can’t), more than any Enderie work I’ve heard, it’s all about that bass.
It underwrites all thirty minutes of the wildly syncopated, polyrhythmic mayhem with such a contrasting, solid certainty that occasionally I had to listen back and see if the same bassline hadn’t been carried over from one cut to the next. If it had (it hasn’t), it would just be another cheeky gesture from a man who is endlessly stuffing humorous jabs into his work. I, on the other hand, like a man drowning, was looking for constants that I could grab on to on repeat listens of 3 and that is one of them. Another may be that the treble solos are often hilariously silly, like the farty noises that squeak like a bad case of the bloats out of at least half of the seven-and-a-half-minutes of break.
Breaks are such a broad church, but outside of some of the more obvious samples, almost drowned in the huge, delicious engine room of its rhythm section, I’m not sure how this is an exploration of that ‘genre’. To me it sounds like a distant cousin to Fat Controller, one of my favourite-ever Squarepusher tracks, in its fuzzy middle frequencies, frisky syncopation and that shake-the-foundations bass. As two stylistic mavericks, both with irreverent senses of humor, so I suppose it's not surprising to note certain similarities.
Another of Enderie’s inspirations was one that had me reaching for Wikipedia. I'm not that familiar with UK-garage-subgenre / speed-garage-spinoff, bassline. Most of the examples you’ll run into on a jaunt through Youtube emphasise the house elements that have accompanied the style across its developmental mutations. Enderie’s Bass strips that out in favour of a hard-edged techno and, of course, more of that bass.
I expect that there is quite a lot out there that sounds like this, if you dig hard enough. It’s certainly the case with Step, a stab at dubstep, which, unsurprisingly, sounds nothing like the bro-step trashfire that most people are familiar with and much more like the work of its earlier progenitors such as Shackleton or Vex’d; something of that ilk. You can hear the pounding techno and syncopated, two-step influenced history of the sound at work, so this may not be an innovation so much as a fond memory of the past. At any rate, to answer that weird, lo-fi voice that drifts out of the depths, repeatedly checking “U... R... well?” Yes, thankyou, loving this. It was released as a seven-minute ‘single’ in the lead-up to the EP, but really, everything here feels like it could have done as good a job. Even the highly unusual take on ‘swing’, which propels the hip-twisting rhythm on the cut of the same name is a (heavyweight, crushing) winner and just a whole lot more entertaining than any of the other cheesy fusions of beats and old-timey jiving I've heard.
Maybe it’s just me (this thunderous stuff is right up my alley), but 3 seems more genuinely willing to entertain than the largest part of the Enderie discography. That wall-to-wall bass is produced with a wonderful warmth that justifies everything else here (even the farty noises); the wild syncopations and squelchy fuzz are like intricate icing on a triple-layer mud cake of sound and they keep your neurons firing as you dance the night away. Oh and if you can’t dance to this then, sorry, you can’t dance to anything.
- Chris Cobcroft.