#verspers

Bola, aka Darrell Fitton, is more important than you might think. An important member of the Skam crew, he was a close friend of Autechre’s Sean Booth and Rob Brown, even letting them use the studio equipment in the music store (Rochdale’s Dr Rock) where he worked. He appeared on Warp’s second Artifical Intelligence compilation in ’94, but it took another four years before his debut album – the phenomenally good Soup (bowl of soup, geddit?) – finally dropped. His best track, however, was hidden on the end of ‘00s Mauver (bowl ‘em over, geddit?), camouflaged by the flashy stuttering rap of opener ‘Mauver’. ‘Vespers’ is one of the finest, most crystalline tracks the genre ever birthed and not only summed up Fitton’s career perfectly, but solidified a sound. We didn’t need any more gauzy, moving and melancholy electronic music after this – it had already been nailed. Perfection.