Debut album from a mysterious new operator on Hospital Productions, a “fallen disciple’ who grew up in a religious cult and who now makes masterfully crafted Techno and EBM modelled in the image of classic Regis, Silent Servant and Ancient Methods productions and which features recordings of sermons by the pastor he had to listen to during his religious upbringing.
‘Suburban Scum’ is Nathaniel Young aka Guilt Attendant's devilishly detailed debut of girder-strength techno for Hospital Productions, forged in the image of late ‘90s hard techno and reverberating strongly with prevailing trends. It’s inspired and informed by the artist’s deeply held urge to undo the dogma instilled by his religious Christian upbringing. and, as such, it expresses a sense of free will within the context of Satan’s fall from grace, fully grasping techno’s repetitive excess as a potential path to hedonism, freedom and other ungodly matters.
Recorded between 2016-2019, the 8 tracks of ’Suburban Scum’ find Guilt Attendant in cold control of his agency. While they may possibly make crowds consider their own relationship to god, especially in his use of sampled sermons by his former preacher that crop up throughout, and most strikingly on the closing ’Severe Mercy’, the majority are more likely to make dancers slam the walls and trample a hole in the ‘floor, especially with the galloping horsepower traction of ‘Broken (Free)’ and his scudding 140bpm missile ‘Cursed Spawn of White Flight’, while the title track deals in purely clenched EBM and the dread-filled palpitations of ‘Imminent Unraveling’ features his vocals low in the mix and wrapped around the track’s rugged spine.
While there’s a certain irony in eschewing one dogma to embrace another, Guilt Attendant utilises the inherently principled form of hard techno as a steely framework in which to explore his own spirit. In the process he opens a derelict warehouse-like playground to reflect on key themes of moral independence, social segregation, free will, blissful despair and decisive autonomy - that patently apply to popular conceptions of the dancefloor as “church” and techno as ritual.