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Alone in a crowd >> Neotropic's psychedelic solitude by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
And then she heads straight for the familiar confines of her studio, to create a soundtrack to your day. Under the guise of Neotropic, Maslen glues together whatever strange sounds she can lay her hands on, sculpting the kind of analog electronica that's better suited to rainy-day bus rides than all-night disco marathons. "I've never really intended to make music for a dancefloor," she explains. "It's not something I think about when I'm writing. I feel more like I'm writing a composition, and it's just me channelling my emotions. It's more of an emotional trip than anything else." That trip can get pretty eerie, if Mr. Brubaker's Strawberry Alarm Clock is any indication. That's Neotropic's latest release on Ninja Tune's N-Tone spinoff label, and it gets pretty dark at times. Dark enough to earn her a spot on Skinny Puppy's new remix disc, Dystemper. "I had to lift everything from the CD, because they're all junkies, and they'd lost all the original parts," she says. "It was a real challenge for me, because I knew I had to prove something to these guys, because they're dull. So I had to try and be a little more cutting edge." Puppy love aside, Maslen takes a lot of her cues from Future Sounds of London, her friends and one-time collaborators. "At that time we were coming to the end of the whole rave thing, in the early '90s, so music was changing. It was FSOL who inspired me, in a lot of ways, to make more music. The way they used their samplers was very different from the way I'd been learning, because I'd been working with somebody else who made hip hop and reggae." FSOL are as definitive an act as any in electronica's graduation from beat-based dancefloor wax to cheeb-charged headphone fuel, and Neotropic sits restlessly between the two. Ominous exercises in low-key paranoia give way to occasional beat bursts and groovy chunks of Farfisa action. Agitated bunches of colourful shapes lurk about in the shadows, grinding, chiming and clattering. These are nervous, hallucinatory portraits of the urban environments Maslen feels both at home in and strangely distanced from. It only makes sense, then, that the slideshows that complement her performances reflect that feel, random images from this city and that, culled from Maslen's travels and those of helpful friends. "It's nice to bring that to other people. Not everyone gets to travel, to get out of their own town. Also, it gives the audience something to focus on, because I'm not really a performer, as in, I wave my arms around and things like that. I'm very static on stage. And I like that. I feel safe surrounded by my equipment, with my head down." Like the shiny red strawberry on her album cover, hemmed in by a sea of brass gears and cogs, Maslen's quite happy to be nestled inside a mechanical cocoon. Her wonky machines are friends she can count on. Why hang out with anyone else?
With DJs Luv and Notorious Wig at
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Riz Maslen isn't the least bit apologetic about the fact that she prefers her own company as much as anyone else's. "What I listen to is a lot of music on is headphones, and I walk around London a lot like that. I get a real kick out of it. I can totally block out the rest of humanity, and it's just me, my music and the architecture. I'm surrounded by all these people in suits, and there's me sort of wandering around with my headphones on, creating a soundtrack to my day."