Bending reality with Basic Unit’s Timeline, The Unconsoled of drum & bass
Enigmatic; un-knowable; sumptuous; confounding: to find one piece of art like this is a pleasure; to find two, a privilege; and to come across two in the very same week, an unimaginable delight.
And yet that is precisely what happened to me recently in the shape of Basic Unit’s Timeline and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. They are not, on the face of it, obvious bedfellows. Timeline is a 1998 album by little-known drum & bass duo Basic Unit that, for reasons beyond their control, essentially vanished on release.
The Unconsoled is the fourth novel by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, released in 1995 after The Remains of the Day had made him into one of the most acclaimed living writers in the English language. While Timeline disappeared, The Unconsoled was endlessly discussed, with commentators unable to agree if the book was genius or madness.
The fact that I stumbled upon both of them in the same week is coincidence: Timeline is getting its first vinyl release in June courtesy of Sneaker Social Club; The Unconsoled was a St Jordi’s day gift from my wife that had been sitting on my shelves for weeks while I finished my library books.
And yet the similarities between the two are huge. Both Timeline and The Unconsoled are works of art that come in apparently classical forms. Timeline is an album of 12 songs that was originally released on CD; it has many of the typical traits of drum & bass circa 1998, including huge drum lines, ominous samples, nervous half melodies; and machine rhythms. The Unconsoled is a novel of 500 odd pages that has recurring characters, a plot, a central theme, dialogue and description. So far, so normal.
And yet what both works do with these familiar elements is sorcery, winding and twisting them into enigmatic shapes that never quite resolve as you might expect, leaving the consumer on the edge of their seat with nervous excitement.
In each case, you feel like the creator knows how their respective piece of art should play out. Basic Unit - their name so generic I genuinely can’t remember if I had ever heard of them before - released several 12 inches on labels such as Moving Shadow and Audio Couture in the 90s.
These are not exactly conventional, with snaking, cut-up breaks and a sound that falls somewhere between the robotic thump of toughest techstep and the elegant drift of ambient drum & bass. But they are not that far out either, the kind of thing an adventurous D&B DJ - Grooverider, say - could work into their sets without a great deal of fuss.
Ishiguro, meanwhile, proved with The Remains of the Day that he could write a cultured but very moving novel that reached a huge mainstream audience without catering to the lowest common denominator. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating book that examines ideas such as the unreliable narrator and the importance of self sacrifice. But it does so within a relatively traditional framework.
With both Timeline and The Unconsoled, what the authors do so brilliantly is to use our expectations of certain cultural frameworks - of how things should be - to tease the consumer, confounding our expectations at every turn.
So, for example, Receive, the second track on Timeline, starts with the kind of ominous drone and oriental drum sample you might expect of an adventurous drum & bass track in 1998, a little like the atmospheric tensions of Photek. But when the drums comes in, they stubbornly refuse to be what you want them to be.
You expect the drums to be at a certain speed - around 170 BPM maybe - because that’s what drum & bass rhythms do. And for an uncertain second it feels like they are going to do that, the bass drum and snare hinting at a typical jungle drum pattern, before the rhythm collapses in on itself.
There are spare snare hits all over the place and the drums don’t appear to be following a recognisable pattern. Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t one; more that I’m not clever enough to recognise it, like drum & bass for chess masters and brooding TV detectives from Scandinavia. At a push, you might call the musical mix Photek meets Autechre - although it feels a lot more abstract than the former and a lot more sparsely threatening than the latter.
It’s the same on Coded, track four, a track whose rhythm defies any logical attempt to count it out or bring it to logical bear, while still containing enough delicate interplay between cymbal and snare to actually sound pretty funky, albeit a funk played out in quantum dimensions, outside of the bounds of traditional beat science. Index, meanwhile, sounds like a drum & bass robot that has fallen over and is struggling to right itself.
If I am talking a lot about the drums on Timeline, that’s because there isn’t a lot else to most tunes: the odd drone, a spare bass pulse, a buried sample and the slightest suggestion of a melody. This is enough to suggest drum & bass - and in particular techstep, to which this album is sometimes compared - but rarely enough to distract from the excellent drums, around which most songs hang their hats. (There are sounds basically without drums on Timeine but these are the ones I enjoy least.)
The texture of the drums is fascinating too. Drum & bass - and particularly the kind where the drums are this artfully mangled - is often based around breakbeats, a well-worn handful of which dominate (the Amen, Apache, Think breaks etc.). And these familiar sounds offer a modicum of comfort to the listener when producers employ them in the name of avant beat-mangling. Because, yes, this is a very strange drum cut up; but it is also a very strange cut up of a sample we know and love.
Basic Unit do none of this. Their drums tracks appear built up from individual drum sounds, rather than from a friendly Amen. And this leaves the listener even more stranded in the wide-open space of the avant garde, with little to hang on to. (It is ironic that the album contains songs called “Resolution” and “Closure” when these are two qualities it resolutely refuses to offer.)
Ishiguro pulls similar tricks in The Unconsoled. The familiar elements of a novel are there but they don’t quite fit together in the traditional way. Ryder, the first-person narrator, tells us at one point exactly what is happening inside a house, as he is waiting in a car outside - an impossible situation, whose impossibility is never explained or justified, it simply exists in a moment of flashing omniscience. The reader either has to give up on the book or take this deviance at face value, forging a new contract between reader and author where something seemingly illogical this is simply allowed to happen.
And this happens time and time again: Ryder, a vaguely tortured concert pianist, sometimes travels for hours to bizarre new locations in the nameless town where the story is set, only to realise he is back at the hotel where he started. It makes no sense; it just is.
One of the most difficult things about reading The Unconsoled - and a lot of people genuinely hate the book - is that nothing ever really concludes. People do things - but, in doing them, fresh obligations spring up, none of which is drawn to a conclusion, in a kind of waking dream state.
It can be frustrating: you want to yell at Ryder, to go back to the café and collect Boris, who he has left there for hours. But he doesn’t, not just yet, and you just have to accept it.
This is like a fundamental betrayal of the unwritten pact between reader and author that, although the events in a book are fiction, they will, in some way be resolved. In the same way, we expect the drums in Timeline to resolve in some way into a recognisable pattern. But they never do.
For some readers / listeners this will be unacceptable and it doesn’t surprise me that both Timeline and The Unconsoled received some very negative reviews on release. Mixmag called Timeline “unlistenable”, while literary critic James Wood said that The Unconsoled had “invented its own category of badness”. (Which, actually, sounds pretty great, now you think of it. But I don’t think it was intended as a compliment.)
However, I find both Timeline and The Unconsoled utterly riveting, like being beamed to a parallel universe where everything is just a little bit different and you can’t work out why. (Or a dream state, maybe.) You can’t make easy assumptions about either work - so you can’t afford to turn away from them for a second. (Don’t try to listen to Timeline as you read The Unconsoled, though: you will suffer intensely.)
What’s more, I doubt I will ever get bored of either work. Boredom is often born of overfamiliarity, of understanding a piece of art too well. And that will never be the case with Timeline and The Unconsoled, two works where each fresh page or new sound invites a discrete universe of theories.
Timeline and The Unconsoled are very different pieces of art. But they make me feel similar emotions: alert but nervous; addicted but reluctant; engaged but happily mystified; and in awe of human artistic achievement. They are subtle experiments that pick away at reality like a cat at a sofa.
After a rash of negative reviews The Unconsoled is now widely seen as a classic of modern literature, Ishiguro’s best work in a highly acclaimed career. As for Timeline, not a lot of critical appraisals exist. Mixmag, in its review of the record, did suggest that this “unlistenable” album might make sense in 50 years time. Only 27 years have passed since its release but now, perhaps, it is time to prove them right and bring rightful acclaim to surely the only album in history equidistant between Groove and Ishiguro’s Ryder.
Some listening
Just when you thought all avenues of modern drum & bass / jungle had been exhausted, in steps Soulox with this creepy, fog-filled banger, which sounds like a Logical Progression club night viewed through the haze of a painful memory, the various musical layers filtered so thoroughly it feels like Soulox might even be ashamed of them. Orchid Pt. 1 is one of those songs where you wonder, just for a second, if the MP3 you’re listening to is messed up - and is all the better for this suggestion of imperfection.
Water From Your Eyes - Life Signs
In a smarter world Water From Your Eyes would be huge stars and Life Signs would be number one forever. In this world, though, will we ever send a song that sounds like The Strokes and Stereolab tussling over a Tortoise 12 inch to the top of the charts? Life Signs is both dreamy and hard, experimental and pop, laded to the hilt with hooks, a confirmation that Water From You Eyes really are one of our best bands.
Nu UKG phenomena Sammy Virji and emerging producer Jess Cake are behind the boards from this single from Kiesza, crafting one of those instrumental beds so simple you could knock it out on the family piano and so addictive it itches like fresh mosquito bites. Kiesza knows well enough to stay out of the way of such an epic hook, her vocals a refreshingly ego-free lesson in doing just enough to send the track into orbit.
Take the best of electronic music - the adventurous production and razor-sharp drums, say - and add it to the best of shoegazing - notably the melancholic drift - and what you have is Shine, by IDM veteran Mark Van Hoen (AKA Locust) and Rachel Goswell. The Slowdive singer sounds like the phantom of lost love on this incredibly graceful cover of Shine, originally released on Slowdive’s 1991 EP Holding Our Breath, while Van Hoen’s production adds the lusty tang of vinegar to the vocal’s honey.
Sly & the Family Stone - I Gotta Go Now (Up On The Floor)
RIP Sly Stone, an absolutely remarkable musician and fascinating person, who achieved so much and yet ended up ground down by expectation (as Questlove’s excellent documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) explained so brilliantly.) Sly left so much incredible music to remember him by but how about this, from the forthcoming live album Sly & The Family Stone’s The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967, the earlier known live recording of the band?
It was after a gig at the Winchester Cathedral (not that one, obviously) that CBS’s David Kapralik signed the band, which makes this album important historically. But as I Gotta Go Now (Up On The Floor), the first single released from the album, proves, it is also a riot, the band as tight as Sly’s funkiest pants, bursting with melody, life and funk.
Raytracer is billed as “techno Vs. grime” and, amazingly, it actually lives up to this, the bass drum and B line banging away like a classic Dizzee Rascal production sped up for Belgium techno heads (think I Luv U at +32), to which Nectax throws in a classically rave-y, pitched up vocal sample, both euphoric and slightly lost at the same time. (And look out for an interview with Hooversound co-boss SHERELLE coming on Line Noise soo.)
Things I’ve done
It was Primavera last week and I did 26 interviews over the four days. Many of them you can check out on the archived live streams on the Radio Primavera Sound YouTube. Others have been snipped out into their own proud little pieces, including this with Danny L Harle, this with Kelly Lee Owens and this with Idles. LOTS more to come, too.
The playlists
“When you playlist, playlist hard; when you work, don't playlist at all.”
So said Theodore Roosevelt and he surely knew what he was talking about. Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. Do follow them for all the best new music.