Recommended: Shawn O'Sullivan - Free Flight

If the necessity of record shops is lost on you, then let this be testament to why they are still around in 2012. Thanks to some digging and a strange watercolour pelican on the label we discovered Shawn O’Sullivan’s “Free Flight” on W.T. Records. It was released in January and just reached our ears this week (shame on us). Without too much pigeonholing, the four track EP is techno submersed in an abstract and industrial world. The word submersed fits this record perfectly as it does have an underlying layer of fuzz and subtle acid lines, which gives it that drowned out and underwater sound. O’Sullivan slowly carves out pieces of the gloomy world he’s envisioned and with each minute the world appears to get more complex, though in reality he keeps everything relatively simple and rhythmically appealing; the music is just so dense, that it sounds as if a knife could cut through it!

Stream: Shawn O’Sullivan – Unarmed (W.T. Records)

“Free Flight”, the title track, immediately drags you in and no matter what you were listening to previously this instantaneously changes the mood. While listening we could feel our heart rate slowing down with the music. If Andy Stott had an American clone, O’Sullivan would be him; it’s eyes down knackered house, not for the faint of heart. After that foray into a deep corner of the sea, somewhere around James Cameron, he injects a little bit of melancholic melody into the project through “Unarmed”. Light acid lines, which escape the somewhat overused and cheesy squelching sound, breath life into the track. If you’ll allow us to make another comparison, his sound shares a lot in common with the music of Plangent Records’ Recondite. “At The Reservoir” may be our favorite of the four; from the very first moment we knew this was, in our minds, the perfect after hours track. It’s calm yet energetic and unusually hypnotic for a track that is so noisy and industrial. The noise ladened “What When How” acts as the crescendo of the record. Filled with modulated synths and a big room drum pattern it takes the EP to the brink as if he decided to use outtakes from the first three tracks. After seven minutes we weren’t even sure what happened, but we enjoyed it. In the end, there are two takeaways from this release. One, Shawn O’Sullivan is someone to keep an eye on. And two, record shops are still around so that you can stumble on gems like these as well as the communities around them.