Quiet Husband

Raging Habits

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Colour LP

Boomkat Product Review:

Renowned visual artist-turned-musician Richie Culver pounds out some of his earliest productions as Quiet Husband on this small vinyl run, ranging from unsteady VHS moodpieces to high velocity trance-techno rinseouts, danker than the Humber in midwinter.

Quiet Husband hails Culver in a formative era, long before Drake came knocking, back in the early ‘00s, when he was sequestered in the end-of-road town of Withernsea, beyond Hull on the North sea coast. A lot has changed for Richie since then - years spent partying in Hull squats, Berghain, and stints of homelessness, followed by global success as a visual artist, and more recently as a distinctive musical voice and collaborator of Teresa Winter, Blackhaine, Rainy Miller, Moor Mother, Space Afrika and Michael J. Blod, among others - but it’s not hard to hear the roots of his thing here.

Produced on gear loaned him by a friend who was out of town, the tracks are very much of their time, which has coincidentally come around again with prevailing trends toward the sort of brisk techno practiced just before and around the time that Berghain came to ascendance, and resonates with our own particular paths from clubs on the north eastern coast to free parties and Berlin - we can affirm that he’s on the money for that sound.

Leaning in with the transition from goblin-speak ambient to meat motor catalyser in ‘A1’, it drops out to dark, nithered and beat-less textures in ‘A2’ and glydes on empty-bellied sinew and amphetamines with a gaunt elegance on ‘A3’, whilst the bleary ambient prayer ‘B1’ hears him sow seeds for the sound that would gestate and flower in ‘By The Sea’, and the hypnotic momentum of ‘B2’ feels like a séance with his former self across a time and space that has both coiled up and flattened into the timeline’s current eternal feedback loop.

Sick artwork too, not many of these about.

Colour LP (5)