MANTLE

Manchester · b. 1997 · FARA Records

MANTLE (b. 25 March 1997, Manchester) works almost entirely without a voice in a genre that's built around one — a deliberate choice rather than a limitation, and the entire foundation of his identity as a producer. He came to dubstep through its sound-design end rather than its vocal or MC end, more interested in what a system of speakers can do to a room than in what anyone says over the top of it. Manchester's bass and dance heritage runs under everything he makes, but he's never been interested in the city's more vocal, more social traditions — he found his way in alone, treating early tracks as physical engineering problems rather than songs, working out what weight actually is before he worked out what a hook was.

He treats a record less like a song and more like a physical object — something with weight, mass and structure, built to be placed in a room rather than sung to a listener. His palette is deliberately non-human: metallic, mechanical, geological rather than melodic, closer to the sound of tectonic movement than to anything a voice could make. Three drops that get progressively heavier, real silence between them rather than a conventional build, and a sub-bass discipline built around one specific physical fact — below 80Hz, the ear genuinely can't locate a source, so weight reads as either very close or very large, and the ambiguity is the point rather than a technical footnote. His influences run half-time dubstep and riddim's sound-design tradition rather than its vocal one, and, entirely seriously, geology — basalt columns, fault lines, strata — which he thinks about more directly than he thinks about music theory.

Almost entirely absent from any imagery associated with the project, which is a deliberate extension of the same instinct that keeps his tracks voiceless — the music doesn't need a person standing in front of it, and neither does the artist. He thinks in geological terms as a matter of habit rather than metaphor, and can explain a mix decision using a rock formation faster than he can using production vocabulary. He builds for the physical response first and the emotional one second, if at all, and considers a track that needs to be understood before it works a failed one. Reclusive, exact, physically minded.