HEAD HIGH

Delete @ Jacob’s Market, Cardiff

Sat 27 Feb

Head High, AKA Shed, is known for being provocative, at least when being interviewed by the music press, but then, so is Aphex Twin. The two share more than this, too: unlike many upper-echelon techno producers, Shed has a wild and prolific kind of creativity, releasing albums and club tracks for the last decade under a range of different names including (but not limited to) Evil Fred, The Panamax Project, Craft, The Traveller, PCK, War Easy Made, Seelow, Sigg Gonzalez and Zigg Gonzaless.

Influenced by the last quarter-century of UK bass and beat experimentation as much as the USA and Europe’s history of machine music, he travels the spectrum of techno – from beautiful braindance with complex melodic and rhythmic ideas akin to early Warp releases, to huge, spacious warehouse tracks that evoke toughened-steel aircraft hangars as much as dark clubs. The series of records he released as Wax put the bones of dub techno and deep house into a vice, jacking as cold and hard as ice, with a dubby polish that makes the rhythms all the more physical. Some of his tracks as EQD could be described as definitive German techno, dense structures that drive forward while carefully calibrated melody seeps into the brain’s pleasure receptors and creates a knot in your stomach.

Head High has been the most active part of Shed in recent years, and it’s that side which Delete bring to Wales this month. Over the past handful of years he has carved out a tunnel of mood and memory right back to the original rave feeling with tracks like Rave (Dirt Mix) and Hex Factor, bringing it into the third millennium with a glacial sheen of futurism. Shed’s formidable studio knowledge allows him to draw out mythic, expansive and downright exciting feelings through an interplay of subtle textures. If you’ve never understood the repetitiveness of techno, never been transported through the wormhole into the zone beyond, this would be a good night to make the journey.

Tickets: £15/£12. Info: 029 2039 0939

words GWYN THOMAS DE CHROUSTCHOFF, photos SEBASTIAN SZARY