Fhloston Paradigm - The Phoenix

Centred around sci-fi, Britt’s Fhloston Paradigm guise (sorta/kinda named after the spaceship in The Fifth Element) provides an outlet for this passion; music’s not the only medium he uses though, and those with access to NYC’s MoMA can see him curate a “daylong session… based on Afrofuturism and black sci-fi.”

Britt is hugely visual on The Phoenix, his debut LP as Fhloston Paradigm. There have been a smattering of miniature releases over the past few years, most notably an EP for Hyperdub in 2012, but this will be the first time that Britt has been able to sprawl out and breathe, much like the way you do when your beau is out of town and you’ve got a double bed all to yourself. No longer confined to small-scale raids, Britt delivers a muscular effort, with drama, energy, emotion and depth. For an avant-garde dance record to instil and nurture imagination the way The Phoenix does is rare, but maybe dance (or furthermore, electronic music in general) just lends itself to sci-fi interpretations more easily.

Britt’s alter-ego is maturing splendidly as a living, breathing beast. Influenced perhaps more by film and visual arts than music (Britt claims Blade Runner and The Man Who Fell To Earth were instrumental), it takes a different route to his King Britt dance music, where he’s famed for his tech-soul noises. Instead, Fhloston Paradigm lunges into surrealist spacescapes, electronica wastelands and the void between Laurel Halo’s disturbed carte blanche techno and the frayed edges of Kompakt.

This vagrant soundtrack that Britt has cultivated ducks and weaves around central themes, but on the whole remains a constant, evolving symphony as opposed to fragmented, cut-up tracks. “Never Forget” squelches, marches and blares sirens; macabre electro-funk dominates the fray in “Chasing Rainbows”; “Race To The Moon” is part Gravity OST and part Daft Punk doing Tron. While there are distinct characteristics that give The Phoenix personality, there’s also a thread – a pulse – that serves as a backbone and keeps the core strong the way any great soundtrack does.

Guest vocalists (Pia Ercole, Rachel Claudio, Natasha Kmeto) inject fresh timbres to keep the record buoyant and alive. “Never Defeated” excels at invigorating the album: Claudio’s voice slithers along, backed by mesmerised harmonies, recalling the kind of enchanting vocals of trip-hop acts like Lamb or Portishead. Kmeto coos over “Light On Edge”, a kind of astral R&B ditty that floats and dissipates like mist rolling through valleys. The beats are massively subdued on this cut, and the resulting clarity is, in contrast to the sculpted techno, tranquil.

There are sonic motifs and revisited forms implying denouements, climactic death scenes and intricate romantic entanglements. It could be argued that you need to put in some effort yourself to fully enjoy music like this that demands activity from your brain, but with a catalyst like The Phoenix, all you need to do is listen and let your mind wander into a galaxy far, far away.