Jamie Roberts’ meticulously sculpted, brain-detonating sonic constructions provide a peek into an unsettling vision of the future, finds Jon Buckland
At the turn of the 20th century, a group of Italian artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers proposed the concept of Futurism: an ideology that praised speed, technology, youth, and violence. They wanted to create sounds that emulated the roar of the world and, in particular, the cacophony of war. Seventy years later, industrial artists, aided by synthesizers, feedback loops, and an array of effects, introduced the slamming sounds of dwindling manufacturing to the musical canvas. Then, in Detroit, rage was channelled via drum machines to create repetitive techno beats as car production faltered and stalled, worsening social, racial, and …
Jamie Roberts’ meticulously sculpted, brain-detonating sonic constructions provide a peek into an unsettling vision of the future, finds Jon Buckland
At the turn of the 20th century, a group of Italian artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers proposed the concept of Futurism: an ideology that praised speed, technology, youth, and violence. They wanted to create sounds that emulated the roar of the world and, in particular, the cacophony of war. Seventy years later, industrial artists, aided by synthesizers, feedback loops, and an array of effects, introduced the slamming sounds of dwindling manufacturing to the musical canvas. Then, in Detroit, rage was channelled via drum machines to create repetitive techno beats as car production faltered and stalled, worsening social, racial, and economic divides. Ten years after that, as Thatcherite fiscal policies left scars across the UK, jungle, through ragga basslines and Amen breaks, offered an outlet for those caught in the undertow. The following decade, in crumbling tower blocks, Grime fused these elements with aggressively spat poetry, reflecting the inequalities of London boroughs and beyond.
This brief, barely even potted history of musical evolution leads us to 2025 and to Blawan.
At the formative age of 14, Jamie Roberts (aka Blawan) worked in a maggot farm. He rose at 4 AM and went into the 50°C heat of the sheds to shovel mountains of rotten meat for the little wrigglers to feast upon. Roberts remembers “the wall of ammonia that the millions of maggots created would initially cause your throat to seize up so you wouldn’t be able to breathe for the first ten seconds.” Throw in the metallic cacophony of the maggot farm’s industrial mincer, and you have a writhing, squirming, clangourous atmosphere that has left an indelible imprint on his creative output.
2012’s pounding sleeper hit ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’, with its pitched down Fugees sample and bare bones production, brought Roberts to the attention of an unexpectedly eager world. This surprise success caused him to take a step back and recalibrate what he wanted to do with music.
It turns out that what he wanted was to evolve. To mutate. Which is what he’s been doing ever since. The steady stream of EPs – almost one a year for the past decade and a half – showcases his prodigious ability to carve compelling soundscapes from carefully crafted digital minutiae and an infectious love for thunderous drums.
With SickElixir, Roberts has shifted gears again, seemingly predicting the next sonic iteration – and accompanying societal collapse. It warns of an impending future, of the age of automation gone horribly wrong. Where uncontrollable robotics lash out. A time when the feeding frenzies of large language models have finally been sated. When humans are deemed superfluous, tossed aside, and our new mechanical overlords party all night long to artificially intelligent dance music.
It all starts terrifyingly enough on opening track ‘The GL Lights’, with what sounds like audio outtakes from a reworking of Transformers helmed by Gaspar Noé. Its hard edges meet with jarring rhythms fashioned from metal bars and broken glass as grubby electronics spark like fuse boxes eyeing up retirement. This grizzled palette seems to draw on the output of Persher, Blawan’s extreme metal collaborative project with Pariah, with demented vocals wrenched from a recently unearthed oesophagus croaking out diabolical schemes.
Those demonic lamentations appear elsewhere, too. ‘During Elevation’ takes us on a nighttime joyride amidst lysergic landscapes dreamt up by pinball machine designers, bolstered further by inhuman growling from the depths of Hades. And the basso profondo of ‘WTF’ reimagines Armand Van Helden’s ‘Kentucky Fried Flow’ as if recited by Beelzebub himself.
Voices are mangled and obscured throughout SickElixir. Their messages teeter on the cusp of comprehension but rarely tip over. Shrouded utterances scrape across the battery of mutated and fuzz-strewn synths on ‘TCP Burn’, clashing forcefully with drums that rocket about like Ritalin tics. There is a glimmer of humanity amongst the rampaging machine music, however. The howls at the heart of ‘Sonkind, whilst evidently metallic, express a cathartic emotion rooted not only in straining sinews and pumping ventricles but also in a deep sense of loss. Fourth track ‘Rabbit Hole’ finds Monstera Black’s strangely soulful serenade adding a fresh and humane dynamic to Blawan’s off-kilter digital eruptions and strangely fleshy productions. Her cry of “I’m in a rabbit hole, just keep dancing” is one of the rare moments of vocal clarity.
It’s this urge to dance, combined with meticulously sculpted, brain-detonating sonic constructions, that provides a peek into Blawan’s unsettling vision of the future. The industrial techno of ‘Casch’ lifts its rhythms from earlier progenitors but peppers the beats with the clicks, ticks, pops, whirrs, buzzes, clangs, and general mechanised violence of factories. ‘NOS’, with its furious, burnt-edge basslines and blasts of distorted melody, feels like a hostile takeover in a nightclub. The squawking top-end coming across like a screen packed with dead pixels suddenly given voice.
Third track, ‘Weirdos United’, however, is where it all slots together. Where the revelation that it’s going to go down bad is crystallised. By the time this track hits, the robots have already replaced us. They’ve won. And this unnervingly melancholic take on piston-and-wires R&B is what they celebrate with: bumping and grinding the night away. It melds irate down tuned vox with layers of sighing synth pads, erratically ratcheting drum patterns, and woodwind blasts played on abandoned radiator pipes. A warning to “Shhh… be quiet” is broadcast for any trespassing human ears.
SickElixir is the sound of technology having long widened the disparity between the ruthlessly wealthy and those clinging on by the half moons of their brittle fingernails. Robotics have displaced all but those occupying the very apex of the financial pyramid and they’re letting loose with a triumphant rave that darkens days and lasts for generations, the automated body-poppers only stepping out into the ailing sun to charge their solar batteries. Smoking areas, which were once filled with communal lighters, sneaky one-skin biftas, and evaporating conversations, are populated instead by oily discharges, jettisoned plastic casings, and a few sparking joints.
Energy is diverted away from frivolous human extravagances such as life support machines, operating theatres, heating networks, light sources, transport, and homes, and funnelled into powering revelry that spans aeons, as well as the constantly churning hubs of arms manufacturers, and those insidious LLM servers that splutter their greasy run off into the skies and sea.
Still, on the rare occasion that we’re allowed above ground, Blawan has provided the perfect soundtrack for us to writhe about to, like maggots in the dark.