Servitude In Context

"Peerless animist Mark Fell tweaks the freakiest permutations of computer music on a second dispatch from his personal folio: deploying 40 minutes of poly-temporal limb-swivelling madness that’s required listening for anyone into Autechre, KAKUHAN, Florian Hecker, Errorsmith.

Following one of 2025’s standout EPs, the CEO of the National Centre For Mark Fell Studies fires from the hip in brilliant, club-troubling motion. In step with his 30 years of prism-pushing work, and particularly the ‘Nite Closures’ EP which signalled a concerted return to the ‘floor, Fell pulls aspects of hypermodern dance and electronic musics from Chicago to Tanzania and Japan to his own peculiar agenda. The hugely distinctive results pull the body in thrillingly unusual, typically ascetic arrangements, activating every pointillist drum hit with attack and decay in a soberly ludic play of rhythmelodic tension and release executed to delirious ends. 

As an artist who witnessed, first-hand, the explosion of electronic music in early ‘80s Sheffield, and how it interplayed with house and rave to refract in wildest styles during the ‘90s, Mark is uniquely positioned to pursue his passion for the dynamics of electronic dance music to Nth degrees. ‘Servitude In Context’ continues to firm up ideas on music for movement in the mid 2020s, placing decades of keen observation - from the macro and historic, to niche and hypermodern - at the service of flexing bodies in new directions. Long held notions of multi-stability manifest in what feels like two machines playing chess on the ‘floor, attempting to adapt to each other’s game style and pattern in real time, anticipating and zigzagging the next move, resulting in a plethora of options for limber dancers and those who only bust a move inside their head.

The slow/fast play of accelerating/decelerating strikes and monotonic chatter in ‘Actutations #1 (extended)’ acclimates the body to a uniquely sensual physics that plays out to rudely screwed, asymmetric angularity on ‘time-slur’, and shatterproof elasticity in ‘Taut manifold’ that feels like an LLM trained on Autechre. His ‘Low energy mantra’ rings out the EP’s closest resemblance to melodic structures, like gamelan and footwork refracted via lab grown diamonds, before the staggering ‘anode’ flashes his teeth with a rudeness recalling latter stages of his Pat Thomas jams, and tilts into 12 minutes of proper quicksilver madness on ‘3 lost contours (pts 1-5)’, balancing the sexiness of his Sensate Focus tackle with an updated, clean-hoofed step and parry.

Just Mark Fell, init?! GOAT."

- Boomkat