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Porter Ricks

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Porter Ricks (Mille Plateaux, 1997)

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Newly reissued with different artwork, Porter Ricks’ second album is a fitfully compelling and somewhat perplexing mixed bag that I somehow managed to never hear until now. My befuddlement is largely due to the fact that the first Porter Ricks album (Biokinetics) is an all-time dub techno classic, so I would have expected Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner to expand further upon the formula that they had perfected to great acclaim. Instead, the duo took a more stylistically fluid approach, occasionally returning to Biokinetics-style dub, but also dabbling in dark ambient and some unexpectedly funky strains of house music. 

That said, it is probably wrong to view either Biokinetics and this album as intentional statements or clearly delineated phases of a linear artistic evolution, as both releases are compilations of singles and EPs and Biokinetics got all the great Chain Reaction ones from 1996. This one collects all the Force Inc. EPs from the following year, so these pieces could be anything from Chain Reaction-era outtakes to stylistic experiments to a stab at greater accessibility (though that is hard to imagine, given the cold bleakness of Köner’s solo work). In any case, there are still enough strong pieces to make this an enjoyable album, but anyone hoping for the focus and distinctive vision of Biokinetics will probably want to moderate their expectations a bit before diving into this one.

This uneven and eclectic collection of songs makes a lot more sense if one considers how they were originally released, as the album is essentially four stand-alone singles and their flipsides. And in classic dub fashion, the B-sides tend to be variations of the raw material from the A-side, so there are basically four separate thematically unified clusters of songs here. 

There is one notable exception, however, and it is the album’s longest and strongest piece: “Scuba Lounge.” I do not believe it ever surfaced on a single before appearing on this full length (the Trident EP featured a different “Scuba” piece), but it definitely sounds like it should have been on Biokinetics. It opens in deceptively formless fashion, elegantly blurring together burbling scuba sounds and ominous industrial ambiance, but soon coheres into a killer menacing groove of gurgling bass and seething, slow-motion crunch. 

The other pieces closest to the Biokinetics vein are “Redundance” series from the Vol 1 and Vol 2 EPs. My favorite of the lot is “Redundance 3,” which combines the relentless forward motion of its shuffling beat with an impressively gelatinous and gnarled sounding synth motif. The remaining four “Redundance” pieces are a surprisingly varied lot, taking roughly the same themes in very different directions, as Köner and Mellwig alternately veer into hissing, coldly futuristic ambient (“Redundance (Version)”), a sensually kitschy vintage burlesque show groove (“Redundance 5”), and—weirdest of all—a Bo Diddly beat (“Redundance 6”). 

Similarly wrongfooting are the pieces from Explore/Exposed and Spoil/Spoiled. For example, “Explore” sounds like a New Jack Swing groove augmented with a very insistent wah-wah guitar theme, which the flip resembles guitars from The Church mashed together with a hyper-caffeinated, percussion-heavy, and out-of-control strain of synth pop. That said, “Spoil” is inarguably the biggest shock of the album, as an unrelenting house thump barrels along with a very in-your-face funk bass line and some jangly guitars. It sounds far more like a purposely ham-fisted house remix of an A Certain Ratio single than anything I would expect from Porter Ricks. 

The smeared, hallucinatory, and submerged-sounding flipside (“Spoiled”) is right up my alley though, approximating a building-shaking rave as heard from a neighboring alley. While I wish I loved more than a handful of songs here, I am delighted that this reissue called my attention to a few old classics that were new to me, as Porter Ricks has a tragically lean discography for an influential project that has now spanned a quarter century.

Samples can be found here.

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Porter Ricks, “Biokinetics” (Chain Reaction (1996)/Type (2012))

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Way back in 1996, the duo of Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig released this singles collection on the revered Chain Reaction label. Over the ensuing years, it has justifiably been hailed as an inarguable dub techno classic, but it has remained maddeningly out-of-print for quite some time. Now it is thankfully back again and it still sounds pretty amazing, which is a rather astonishing feat for cutting edge techno from almost two decades ago. I’m a little disappointed that Type did not try to replicate (or outdo) the original, famously CD-damaging metal packaging though.

This is a fascinating album to try to deconstruct, as it often seems like a very abstract and boldly experimental effort that just happens to occasionally feature thumping four-on-the-floor beats. I’m a bit conflicted on house beats in this instance, as I generally hate them with a fiery passion. I definitely found myself annoyed by their blunt prominence in “Port of Call,” but they are employed with tactful and ingenious restraint in most other instances. In fact, the insistent pulsing is actually necessary to make music this uncompromisingly unmusical work. 

That is most apparent in “Biokinetics 2,” which closely resembles Köner’s bleakly alienating and cavernous solo ambient work, but works a bit better due to its deep heart-like throb. The genius of Biokinetics lies in how the beats sound, which is almost always distant and submerged. In fact, the whole album sounds like it was recorded in a deep, dark trench in the ocean. Or perhaps in a bubbling cauldron of molasses. Those are both heartfelt compliments in this case, of course.

My clear favorite piece on the album is the tensely throbbing “Nautical Dub,” which unleashes a very deep and insistently repeating bass line beneath a masterfully executed and shifting soundscape that sounds like a heavily processed rain storm mingled with stabs of hollow, ruined-sounding plonks. I could listen to it forever. There are a number of other pieces on Biokinetics that are more striking though, as Thomas and Andy took their music to some pretty outré places.

The most weird and dance-unfriendly of those pieces is probably “Biokinetics 1,” which warps a synth bass line into a sick slow-motion burbling, dispenses with any kind of beat, and augments it only with a something that resembles a clanking, forlorn, pitch-shifted xylophone. Then, later on the album, the duo spend two entire songs toying with a prominent rhythmic loop that constantly drifts in and out of phase with the very straightforward underlying beat: “Port of Nuba” sounds like a spirited ping-pong match unfolding over an otherwise bland, unremarkable bit of house music, then “Nautical Nuba” sounds like the exact same thing, but somehow underwater.

It is impossible to be unimpressed by the vision and singularity of Biokinetics, but it is a very difficult album to warm to or love in a non-cerebral way. Its appeal lies primarily in how deftly and uniquely it uses minimalist repetition and studio technique to weave something wonderful out of the sparsest musical content. “Nautical Dub” is brilliant, but none of the other pieces are quite on that level. Some of them are pretty unusual, inventive, or ingeniously produced, but that is not quite the same thing as being great.

Also, there is an enormous amount of repetition here. Within songs, I understand that that is largely the point: Köner and Mellwig were using obsessive repetition in service of achieving a cumulative slow-burning intensity. Unfortunately, such intensity was not always the end result and some pieces drag a bit. More significantly, however, Biokinetics is largely composed of related song pairings: for example, “Port Gentil” and “Nautical Zone” are essentially two versions of the exact same piece of music (and make up 25 minutes of the album). 

It is certainly neat and enlightening to hear how the duo transform their base materials, but it also means that Biokinetics only contains five or six real songs. That said, it was never intended as a coherent album, so it is a bit unfair to find fault with that (even though that is how I experienced it)—the important thing is that Biokinetics compiles some truly innovative and inspired work that turned out to be far more timeless than anyone could have anticipated.

Listen here.