Dekmantel Podcast 212 - Clouds

As soft and dreamy as their moniker may be, Clouds actually make some of the most brutal and destructive techno out there. The Scottish duo of Calum MacLeod and Liam Robertson have been doing so with ever more abrasive surfaces and twisted drums since 2010, releasing on the likes of Turbo, Opal Tapes and Soma. Two of their three albums, though, have come on Speedy J’s Electric Deluxe. The latest, Heavy The Eclipse, is a conceptual affair that comes with a brilliantly realised website telling the story of a city that was left to rot after social and economic collapse. This “post-industrial hell-future” is taken over by Germans and renamed Neurealm, and is soundtracked across 14 perfectly dark and dystopian pieces featuring snippets of vocals, tinges of euphoria, passages of desolate dub and frazzled industrial noise. In their mix for us, the pair continue with that bleakly immersive sonic imagery by using unreleased material only! Nightmarish screams are obscured by scuzzy sonic blizzards, rave synths spray about above overdriven drums and hardcore and dub culture references often poke through the mire. It’s an all out aural assault that takes you to the heart of a grotty, strobe-lit warehouse in the very dead of night.