Review: KMFH - The Boat Party

This article was commissioned by thankyoubranch .

Kyle Hall deconstructs his own style in uncompromising fashion.

Kyle Hall's 2013 record, The Boat Party , opens out of time with itself. The drums of opener "KIXCLAP$CHORD$NHAT$" immediately kick in with more of a cacophony of loosely arranged drum splats than a groove, taking several bars to coalesce into something actually resembling techno. The Boat Party is, for the most part, not actually a very wonky record; its grooves are angular and occasionally quite syncopated, but it rarely diverts into straight up off-kilter territory like its first track explores; this should not, however, be taken as indicating the album isn’t very odd in its own right.

The Boat Party is Hall's first full-length, coming off a string of 12"s across both his own Wild Oats label and stalwart imprints like Moods & Grooves Records and Hyperdub, all mostly exploring the same broad concept: stark, hypnotic detroit techno grooves layered with lush, vaguely jazzy analogue synthwork. Hall, who was effectively raised in the techno scene and put out his first EP around the age of 16, was not only a seasoned veteran by this point, but one who had seemingly found his niche; The Boat Party strips this style down to the bare minimum, jettisoning the warm, housey elements and (as seems to be the case strangely often for techno full-lengths - longtime readers will perhaps remember the Nebula II album I've previously reviewed which pulled the same trick) embracing hyperminimalism.

For the most part, the album offers up very few variations on its core formula of utilitarian drumwork paired with one singular sample or other non-percussive element and then stretched over the course of a five to seven minute track with conventional techno progression. "Dr. Crunch" gyrates with trebly, acidic synthwork, embracing the stompiest groove the record can muster up. "Spoof" is similarly synth-driven, its paper-thin pads seemingly near-lost to an ultracompressed void of tape mastering. In fact, the whole album is characterized by a harsh, lo-fi production aesthetic that gives everything a very rough sheen even when Hall isn't intentionally piledriving his tracks into the ground with bursts of extra fucked up processing. At times, Hall seems entirely unconcerned with continuity, haphazardly panning the track or bouncing to another even jankier master for a few seconds before randomly shifting back; these moments of sudden upheaval betray a lack of concern for the tracks' functionality for DJs, surprising for an artist who had previously described himself as "a DJ first" and spoke about how symbiotic the processes of writing for the studio and writing for the club were.

In fact, it's hard to really say The Boat Party is a record aimed at making itself accessible to anyone at all. Of its six main (i.e. longer than two minutes) tracks, the only two which have enough going on to feel like proper "songs" are "Crushed" and "Measure 2 Measure"; both embrace housier grooves, though in slightly different styles, with "Crushed" leaning into melancholic deep house while "Measure 2 Measure" is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a clear riff on Daft Punk’s "Face To Face", mashing Todd Edwards microsampling with french house filtering. To be clear, these songs are still on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to dance music minimalism, but they mark themselves as more clearly accessible than something like "Flemmenup", which almost entirely consists of nothing but drums, or "Finna Pop", which takes the stomp and sampling of ghetto house and extends it out to a brain-melting five minutes (followed by another two minutes of mineralic noise, of course).

The Boat Party is not the only techno LP to dedicate itself to an obstinately stripped-down sound, but it is one of the most stubborn examples I've heard, to the point that it's hard to even criticize. Yes, obviously, the album suffers from giving the listener basically nothing to hold onto, but that's clearly the point - how can I say an album made to be difficult to listen to should be easier to listen to? Ultimately, though, I do think the record suffers a little for never really finding a point. It does, apparently, gesture at a wider theme - he once described the album as being about "the appropriation of black music from a disenfranchised city juxtaposed with luxury European club culture and boat parties" - but it's hard to really see what the album says about the topic or how it actually incarnates within the music, and these tracks are just a hair too committed to the overarching gimmick to fully make sense without that musical-thematic cohesion.

Still, though, the grooves Hall puts together on this album are pretty consistently intoxicating, and at 40 minutes the album hardly feels like it outstays its welcome even if it is frankly too minimalist for its own good. It's interesting to hear an artist really directly refute a core aspect of their own work, and there’s enough variety to the stylistics here that it's not a half-bad listen even without the context of Hall's wider work. The Boat Party may not be the most impressive techno LP ever put together, but it's a lot more interesting than it lets on, and the undercurrent of weirdness running through it ensures that even at its most basic it's not a wasted listen.

The Boat Party is available on Beatport and Bleep . Kyle Hall can also be found on Instagram , Soundcloud , and Bandcamp .