Let It Go [CD]

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Russell Haswell - Let It Go [CD]It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001 -- when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry's sonic insurgent R ussell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997-2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: "Science Fiction is now!" In the face of this darkening reality, Let It Go arrives as both acknowledgment and antidote. This new full length on Editions Mego extends an olive branch through defiant sonic diversity -- an unpredictable mosaic that embraces everything from propulsive rhythms to radical abstraction and enveloping ambience. True to Haswell's core practice, the material draws from the same tactile, free-improvised electroacoustic framework that powers his live sets: immediate, powerful and unscripted. The album weaves reverent echoes of 1990s Detroit techno's hypnotic pulse and the abrasive, metallic edge of the Birmingham sound into fractured generative territories. Haswell returns to his computer-generated origins while integrating his recent modular-synthesis experiments. During a residency at the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) in Norway, he harnessed the latest GRM Tools suite to conjure the volatile, "rapidly fluctuating pitched sounds" that characterized Iannis Xenakis' late electronic works -- resulting in pieces such as "Fall 3" and "Fall 2," where instability becomes a form of vitality. The tracks "Exit Downwards" and "The Anxieties Of Our Time," whilst reflecting the currents of the release, also offer surprisingly melodic patterns over jagged rhythms. The wryly titled "Thu 25 Dec 2025," (recorded in Glasgow after a solitary post-Christmas-lunch walk home) is a vast drone which evolves according to the random walk model -- known more evocatively as the drunken walk -- each sonic step veering unpredictably, mirroring the disoriented lens of contemporary existence. Let It Go is liberation. Amid the cacophony of crumbling certainties, Haswell deploys a full arsenal of resistance: kinetic drive, disorienting rupture, quiet refuge, raw aggression, and tentative hope. In an age where dystopia has shifted from fiction to lived fact, this music asserts that possibility endures. Show more