elecunderground
Member
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2007
- Messages
- 196
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| Reading's Nathan Fake began his career in the farm country of Norfolk in the U.K., where he learned how to play basic acoustic instruments before finding a love of the electronic genres. Fake moved to Reading at the age of 19, which gained his recordings significantly more exposure, and his demos found their way to producer/remixer/DJ James Holden. Holden immediately signed Fake (his actual last name) to his Border Community imprint and released a set of 12"s (Outhouse and The Sky Was Pink) that put him on the global dance scale in terms of recognition. Fans from all electronic genres immediately took to Fake's distinctive sound (including luminaries like François K and Satoshi Tomiie), and his recordings began to be some of the most in demand of 2004. Several 12"s on the Traum imprint followed in 2005, and Fake released his debut full-length, Drowning in a Sea of Love on Border Community, in March of 2006. 'Hard Islands' is the assured and confident new installment from Nathan. A six track long serious contender in the loudness wars, 'Hard Islands' sets up camp in that fuzzy middle ground between mini-album and EP that so many of our alt-dance heroes are choosing to occupy in this post-physical format era, where each track in the complementary collection can also stand alone as a hedonist's anthem in its own right. Easily as melodic and musically ambitious as any of his previous works, the 'Hard Islands' selection nonetheless edges towards the tougher end of electronica that is the usual domain of Warp and Rephlex stalwarts like Clark and Aphex Twin, whilst all the time never losing sight of that acute awareness of what willwork on the dancefloor that had already enabled young Mr Fake tick off many of the world's best clubs on his touring itinerary by the time he had reached his mid-twenties. “Playing live a lot over the last couple of years has had a profound influence on the way I make music now,” says Nathan of his latest offering, and the unique loose-feeling, dynamic and finely-tuned sound that we hear on 'Hard Islands' is the product of that direct experience on the dancefloors of Europe. The tracks that make up this EP were absorbed into Nathan's club set at an early stage, where they were able to gradually evolve in the context of his live performance before finally being pinned down to this fixed recorded form for their official release. A Nathan Fake laptop live show is a much more intense and visual experience than one has traditionally come to expect from the genre, wherein Fake fits and jerks his way through an unstoppable hour long industrial assault with incredible focus, elbows flailing and body contorted to impossible angles as he goes, pushing the Ableton Live software to its limits, maxing out his CPU, and constantly teetering on the brink of computer meltdown. Recent support slots for Squarepusher and Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid have placed Nathan centre stage in the live arena, but ultimately the immediacy of the interaction with the crowd that you get in a club environment remains of the utmost importance to him. |
