Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ Eps

The digital edition of Shackleton’s latest release slaps a series of widescreen EPs (*The Drawbar Organ*) alongside an equally ambitious album (*Music for the Quiet Hour*), leaving open-minded listeners with nearly two and a half hours of new music to wade through. And what a daunting digestive tract of sonic detritus this is, sending the producer’s singular version of percussive bass music through a dizzying array of ominous pipe organs, vaporized vocals, slow-building beatscapes, frothy feedback, hazy red herrings, and paranoid spoken-word passages (the abstract poetry of Vengeance Tenfold, which emerges from the ether like the learned words of a post-apocalyptic wiseman). As for what separates Shackleton’s EPs from his latest long-player, that’s really a matter of mood and tempo. While *The Drawbar Organ* is spacious and sound-designy, *Music for the Quiet Hour* is as live and direct as this kind of thing (read: experimental but engrossing) gets. To quote one of Vengeance Tenfold\'s standout lines, \"Music is the weapon of the future.\" Indeed.

Shackleton's 137-minute-long, 2xCD offering proves anything but bloated; instead, the double release is the British producer's strongest yet, immersive and shining with deliriousness, while continuing his nation's weird and wonderful relationship with dub.