#scape one

Scape One In The Fold (2017)

Scape One: Recombination (Central Processing Unit)

I’ll be honest — the first time I picked up a record by Scape One was way back in 2003, his 2nd 12” released at the time on Köne Records. It’s a pretty reliable slab of faceless electro, at a time when I was really diving headlong into all of the various sides of dance music I’d avoided in my more noise-laden, industrial years that preceded. While it was solid, I didn’t go back for more at the time, but it’s nice to hear that Baggaly has been pumping out records steadily since. In the last several years, he’s taken to self-releasing his tracks, a labor of love I fully support as a fellow artist going it alone. “More Switches” has a more casual tempo, lending it a slightly more humanistic quality, many of its vintage squiggles and zaps of sound recall prime Alexander Robotnick and his contemporaries. To my ears, it feels like one of the best early Depeche Mode instrumentals you never heard. It’s repetitious and infectious, an insistent synth bassline with soaring feedback and a tight drum loop.

“Recombination (Vinyl Edit)” is a chunky electro groove with a really fantastic rhythm section. Its vocoder vocal is mixed a bit loud for my tastes, drowning out the mix with mids, but it has the robotic stride of most classic electro, machinelike and steady, never faltering. About halfway through he doubles up the rhythm track and it gets a lot punchier, good stuff. More quality electro from CPU, who continue to explore reverent and nostalgic takes on classic dance music tropes.