Bhamra's tabla crops up often, adding a scoop of bass or a high-pitched tang to Dillon's super-syncopated rhythms. Their contributions are diced and sliced, slotted into unexpected crevices, or deleted to open up the space again, leaving behind a shadowy lattice of sounds and imprints. Imagine Dr Von Hagens doing Body Worlds in dub, a network of pulsating vessels, suspended in empty space.Īnother complicating factor is Dillon's extensive use of guest musicians, including but not limited to: UK bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra on the tabla, jazz collaborator Jonny Lam on pedal steel guitar, Senegalese kora player Kadialy Kouyaté, avant-garde cellist Lucy Railton and techno operators Batu, Untold and Laurel Halo. Drums are gated, reverb is kept to a minimum. In a particular microsecond, there may be just a single element sounding, or, more often than not, a drop of silence. "What happens," she wondered in a recent interview, "if you take the guts out of the track?" For Dillon, that means a surgical evisceration of her tangled arrangements. Every track ticks along at 150 BPM, a tempo that allows for lurching halftime rhythm play, as well as moments of technoid torque on an Errorsmith tip, like the jittery "Workaround Eight." (The White Cube-ready track titles feel almost comically austere.) Dillon also sets herself the challenge of rethinking dub, discarding some of its typical associations-the space echoes, the dread bass-for an approach that's more about space and absence. Reflecting Dillon's fondness for the gridded thinking of 20th-century minimalism, Workaround follows a few self-imposed rules. This lightness of touch is crucial to the genius of Workaround, which synthesizes all of Dillon's interests and techniques into an album of breathtaking clarity.
"Play" is the operative word-the sternly titled Studies I-XVII For Samplers And Percussion, her 2015 collaboration with Rupert Clervaux, vibrated with a gleeful naivety. On her cassettes and EPs for small labels like Where To Now? and Paralaxe Editions, Dillon has played around with stuttering syncopation, stunted echoes of dub, funk and jungle, and electroacoustic mismatches. Among her influences, Dillon cites the minimalism of visual artists like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd alongside the crates of dub reggae and weird folk that she dug through in her former jobs as record shop clerk and radio researcher. The South London-born, Chelsea art school-trained musician is the kind of artist who thinks across mediums, pondering concepts, affects and textures as often as genre or functionality. Ruff's virtual photogram, in all its hi-tech ghostliness, is a clever fit for Dillon's career-defining first album. The designs are so complex that it can take 2,000 hours to render one image. But in Ruff's version, these objects aren't real-his ghostly 3D assemblages are designed inside the computer, floating in an airless vacuum. Instead, objects like scissors and wire coils are arranged on photo-sensitive paper and then exposed to light, creating an eerie inverted image of varying transparencies. The old-fashioned kind of photogram, like the kind made by the surrealist Man Ray, doesn't involve a camera.
Made by the German artist Thomas Ruff, it's a digitally rendered photogram: a virtual take on a photographic technique invented more than a century ago. The cover of Beatrice Dillon's first album is an impossible image.
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