Axxon N “Petri Dish”

09 Sep 2014 — Henry Schiller

It took four years for UK producer Axxon N (whose pseudonym is an appropriately obscure reference to David Lynch's Inland Empire) to construct  “Petri Dish”, a nearly danceable mishmash of savage samples and percussive experimentation. The length of the recording process seems to have had nothing to do with a lack of ideas on Axxon N's part: “Petri Dish” feels like it's been packed to a bursting point with four years worth of samples, headaches, and technical ingenuity.

Rather than a digital drum machine, the knife-sharp percussion on “Petri Dish” sounds like it might have been generated from samples of:
a) quarter inch cables making brief contact with active inputs
b) microphones getting too close to a singer’s mouth, then shattering
c) trash can lids that have somehow been hooked up to phase shifters

Choppy and repetitive, “Petri Dish” bears some resemblance to a version of Kraftwerk that’s been turned on its head. Rather than take something emotive and turn it into something technological and methodological, as Kraftwerk did with their pop music forebears, Axxon N turns the inhuman and digital into something feral and organic. And so, “Petri Dish”, an apt title for Axxon N’s high-energy samplethon; it's a science experiment. A living explosion of activity that feels like it's caught between a biology student's thesis and the catastrophic release of a dangerous pathogen.

Axxon N’s debut album Heal is out October 13 on Domestic.