RUSSELL HASWELL

A figure of enormous importance in the evolutions of the past decade/decade and a half, that align the common spaces uniting noise, electronic experimentation and dance music (more specifically techno), Russell Haswell has been responsible - even when he is so indirectly - by the approximation of these various vocabularies, whose fusion has become more and more a paradigm in global musical creation.

As much at home at the cathedral of minimal techno, Berlin’s Berghain club, as well as in collaborations with Aphex Twin, Earth, Yasunao Tone or Pita (whose seminal label Mego published his first LP), as well as in his exhibitive and gallery work, one can also add to these plural dimensions his production in the visual arts.

Researcher and intrepid connoisseur of both the digital and analog modular synthesis dimensions in the process of electronic music creation, Haswell’s live work seems to point always towards experiential, existencial and aesthetical obliteration, looking to find - or to return to - nothingness. His is an austerity of means and a phantom-type space typical of several musics of the British isles; a culture that so many times has looked to dance music and to the vanguards of sound exploration as a indivisible whole, and whose collective future progresses, alongside people like Autechre or William Bennett, in the positively obsessive hands of Haswell.