Premiere: Rejections - The Vertical City EP (Remixed)

Rejections is Michael Hann, who produces snarling, industrial electronics out of the North East, and who this week had his latest EP ‘The Vertical City’ released on Nottinghamshire cassette label Jehu and Chinaman. Something of a conceptual project, the EP’s main source of inspiration is British visionary JG Ballard’s 1975 novel ‘High-Rise’.

‘High-Rise’ was the concluding novel in Ballard’s loose “urban disaster” trilogy, preceded by ‘Crash’ and ‘Concrete Island’. Presenting a vision from the near future of a luxury block of suburban flats degenerating towards atavistic meltdown, it was a masterful depiction of the potential fate for post-war tower block development and the notion of self-contained urban living. On ‘The Vertical City’, this is tapped into through Hann’s dank, droning production – confining things within an amorphous space rife with claustrophobia. The shimmers and shards issuing from Body Markings become a compulsive undulation of machine-like tensions – and, like Ballard’s novel, feed into the sense of some unspoken force working below the concrete surface. As you might imagine, it makes for an often terrifying, but always immersive listen.

Rejections has put together a “remixed” version of the EP exclusively for Dummy, which is up for streaming and download below. Michael, along with producer stillpoint, have a Tumblr to accompany the EP, full of images of high-rises in all their bleak, overbearing glory.