Photek - 'Modus Operandi'
No. 23 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums from the 1990s
What would happen if a master samurai slashed beats instead of people?
Rupert Parkes, Englishman of singular focus, decided in the 1990s to find out. Recording under numerous guises — Special Forces, Studio Pressure, Sentinel, Aquarius — his chief alias Photek became synonymous with razor-smart drum ‘n’ bass. A hip hop fan from St. Albans and Ipswich, who discovered rave music in his late teens, Photek combined a love of breakbeats, technology and Asian culture into a highly original martial arts-style music.
Modus Operandi was his manifesto. It flew through mental dojos and koan riddles with lightning striking out from the mind — a telepathic polyrhythmic chronicle. At the heart of his technique was precision, chopping up drum samples into stark constellations of supernatural force, coupled with the death blows that transformed the flash and flurry into decisive revelations. Time was in its essence flow. Yet time in its essence was also still. Together, they killed. One overtaking or fusing the other.
In 1994, his Form & Function vinyl series defined an emerging tension between the calm and alarm of technology’s social acceleration — its pinpoints in space and time articulated hidden dimensions on sly tracks like ‘Book of Changes,’ ‘Consciousness’ and ‘The End’ — castle doors and halls mazing through the psyche. He heightened and deepened the senses with ambient drum ‘n’ bass too — crafting an immersive submarine Zen on classics ‘Dolphin Tune,’ ‘T’Raenon’ and ‘Pharaoh’ — conscious quests for peace in a chaotic and relentless data-verse — while switching into seriously dark jungle on his classic remix of Goldie’s ‘Still Life.’
“I like to create atmospheres and moods by making the music as un-atmospheric as possible,” he explained to The Wire’s Chris Sharp in 1997, a few months before Modus Operandi was released, laying out his alliance to a new kind of minimalism, his drums asking the riddle, What’s the sound of one hand clapping? : “The absence of feeling kind of becomes the feeling … feelings that were impossible to describe, to put into words … You’d almost have to describe someone’s whole life … how they got where they are … which would take hours to explain.”
And so it took hours upon hours for him to deconstruct and reconstruct. While his earliest productions like ‘Dolphin Tune’ still reveled in a more fluid immersion, as he shaved and honed his beats and rhythms, over time, he stripped more and more of hardcore’s breakbeat madness down to an almost skeletal, ghostly impressionism.
“I construct every break that I use myself, sampling each individual percussion sound, experimenting with different attack velocities,” he explained to Sharp, revealing how such precision was folded in on itself so many times, he would utterly transform its feeling, obliterating its crust and impurities, like a Japanese sword-smith smelting tamahagane steel into the long misty silvery crescent blade of the samurai.
“I’m always trying to develop sounds rather than getting them from other sources,” Parkes continued, describing his almost maniacal obsession with detail, as if he were a Japanese sword-maker hammering and brushing a katana blade into perfection. “I get guitars in and make my own sounds from scratch, then process them from there. It’s a whole different technique. Maybe a couple of years ago, l’d cram stuff in, and hurry on to the next part of the tune, but now I give myself time to listen to the sounds over and over again, thinking about what kind of sounds I’m using and how I’m placing them.”
“When you do that, the more obvious, instantly appealing sounds get boring, because you listen to them hundreds of times going round in the loop over a period of weeks, and the more obvious a sound is, the more quickly it wears off,” Parkes described, absence to presence, from out of nothing, something. “You start to do stuff that doesn’t sound quite right to start with, and just let it work itself into the track.”
This attention to detail sometimes led to hyper-dense productions that collapsed under their own weight. But more often, he struck the right balance of impact and lift. When he did, no one could touch him. His masterpiece ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu (Two Swords Technique)‘ is still hands down one of the best things ever created with a computer. Every second clocks in with a new revelation in sound.
It starts off with skin drums and gongs, disturbed from a Zen sleep. A taiko pattern communicates the approach of an assassin. An attack smashes the air. The battle begins. Twirling in swinging kicks, two fighters do the death dance. The sound of drawn swords is followed by ringing clashes. The duelers brush wind chimes and leafless branches as they move and dodge and parry. Back and forth. Under and above. Then, the trail runs cold. A Japanese flute mourns in the night. A respite.
Ba-boom-boom. The battle rejoins with bashing and parrying, up a hillside, over a snowy dell, and onto rooftops. The beats break off, and flash back together again. Voices echo high in ceremony. Metal drums thrash, fierce and stark. They break away into the open for a final encounter — the double, triple, quadruple punches of bass come faster than any thought — at the speed of awe.
The song’s title roughly translates from Japanese to “the strategy of two heavens as one.” It’s a combat style devised by the legendary ronin and sword-master Miyamoto Musashi who lived in the 1600s. Such samurai obsession can tip into silliness and pretension, but it’s also part of a respectable strain in ’80s and ’90s beat science.
“When hundreds of samurai are moving in wooden armour and you’ve got that rattling and shuffling, I’d make that out of something else to imitate that sound,” Parkes told FACT Magazine in 2010. “Like what blues players used to do, to imitate a chugging train, play a riff that sounds like that.”
The Wu-Tang Clan and Depth Charge both adapted martial arts sound effects in their works too. Like Photek, they were part of a generation reared on Bruce Lee and Akira Kurosawa films. Parkes also practiced Tae Kwon Do, and at the height of his Far East mysticism, he even pursued an ascetic lifestyle, save for Lotus sports cars and fancy Reeboks. Muzik magazine poked a little at his image in 1997, describing his chop sticks and Japanese book collection.
If there’s a flaw with Photek’s debut album, it’s that it actually doesn’t include his best composition, ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu,’ which in its majestic power makes a compelling case for all his Far Eastern sentimentalism. It might have even inoculated Modus Operandi from unrealistic expectations. It didn’t help that the album was also a difficult listen, at times so austere that many critics couldn’t withstand its minimal yet relentless onslaught.
Listening to it is like entering a ninja’s telepathic dream saga — a tale of night missions and lonely revenge. And yet, the absence of ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’ is also cunningly self-effacing, a shadow move that requires a deeper meditation, the sound of thought.
“Much of Modus is audio hypnosis,” wrote Urb’s head editor Raymond Leon Roker. “Parkes’ reference points for his songs seem to lie somewhere in the space between R.E.M. sleep and the light of morning. The frantic stir of neurons placing dreams back into your memory banks and bringing consciousness into view are what Parkes seizes upon. He explains his influence as a deja vu of sorts.”
“The track is a memory of a situation you’ve been in,” he told Roker. “You might be remembering a true situation and it’s becoming distorted over time in your mind and you’re remembering it as something being different. Or it could be that you’re remembering something that never happened at all.”
There’s something amazing about what Photek achieved on Operandi by turning techno minimalism inside out. Its aesthetic is spacious and yet its central drama is compressed — into staccato flurries of angular sparks that open and close. Sparse, quick, crisp, booming — Photek shatters time into fragments — and then rearranges them in intricate spells. ‘Smoke Rings’ attacks the frontal lobes with sonic nunchaku, popping and snapping across a barren moonscape. ‘Minotaur’ skips across the dojo, hitting every target in a deadly labyrinth of cat and mouse.
The album is also half jazz hallucination. Opener ‘Hidden Camera’ stalks in double-time while bursts of ghostly light shine from above. The same eerie but pretty synths coat the bass rumblings of ‘124’ and wisp us away on ‘Aleph 1.’ That sound would burn to full on his second album, Solaris. Again and again — deja vu.
The title track ‘Modus Operandi’ seems like a snore at first, but buried in its cool pace is Photek’s same noir detective instinct, tiptoeing to piano and bass. Parkes’ tribute to friend and art-techno maestro Kirk Degiorgio on ‘K.J.Z.’ comes on like the patient jazz of a praying mantis, its gorgeous melodies gliding by like a homesick bat.
A fan on Discogs admiringly described the album in 2003 as a “cold, frozen journey through electronic bleakness and rigid drum sequences, where machines seem to have gained the upper hand on the human factor.” It’s an astute observation about Photek’s razor-sharp line between the human and the machine. The closest thing to Operandi’s sonic edge is perhaps the industrial darkness of tech-funk doyens Underground Resistance, the cosmic minimalism of Jeff Mills or the techno apocalypse of Leftfield‘s Rhythm and Stealth.
But it’s still far out in its likeness to any other music. At first listen, it’s boring and boxed in. But the more and more you listen, the more you realize there is nothing narrow about Operandi. It’s dark and foreboding. It’s claustrophobic and murky. It’s weird. But with a trained ear, it becomes a dynamic prism that turns your mind inside out — in a good way. It’s like walking on the surface of another planet where the stars undulate in an alien atmosphere, where your sense of what’s possible expands. It’s not unlike Tokyo or Kyoto at night — environments that unfold out of detail.
“Japan is a wicked place,” Parkes told Muzik magazine in 1997, pointing outside himself for inspiration. “I think it’s just the atmosphere and attitude of people. They’re so enthusiastic, and open to trying new things, and I get the feeling they’re attuned to my music. Just the way they talk about it and the questions I get asked, the depth they see into what I’m doing. I probably don’t think about it to that level myself, but when I’m asked it all seems to make sense.”
He was picking up on the obsessive compulsive nature of the island nation, its compressed intensity, from the samurai sword’s many steel folds to its meticulous tea ceremony — and perhaps adopting that precision unconsciously. “I can’t get down and work on a track unless I’ve sorted out the drums first,” he told Urb magazine the same year. “I made about 200 breaks in the last year, and there have been probably about ten usable from that lot.”
“There's a direct link to what I do musically,” he confessed to Sharp — reminiscing about watching ‘70s kung fu and samurai shows on the BBC: “The Oriental stuff is something that I’ve always been into, ever since The Water Margin was on TV. I used to do karate when I was younger … and I like to imagine that martial artists who don’t even listen to any sort of music might start to think that jungle’s all right if they heard ‘Ni Ten.’ I love the harmony, the mental discipline — it’s simple but effective.”
Like a Zen painter or a Shaolin master, Parkes captured rhythm in a state of perfect imperfection: ”It sounds like it’s degrading the album to describe it as a sketchbook, like it’s made of all the bits that didn’t make it, but the process of making a record like this, the whole way that it develops, is all so interlinked with itself,” he reflected, as if the album was itself the endless pursuit of perfection. “I think of it as being like the sketchbook of an artist, each piece of music at a different stage of realization, and some people will maybe get more out of the fragments than they might out of the more finished products.” Something back to nothing exploding into everything.
The result is a controversial album, meticulous in its angles and spaces. Modus Operandi split many critics in the West. The Rough Guide’s Peter Shapiro dismissed it as a big disappointment: “as if the computer screen had sapped his energy and stolen his scientific method,” he wrote. Yet that was indeed the point, when taken from the opposite vantage. It’s more about expanse, than trance. The voluble critic Simon Reynolds, the self-appointed cheerleader of authentic jungle and hardcore, was prowling Parkes long before the album — “he’s infected jungle with the funkless frigidity and pseudo-conceptual portentousness of Trance Techno,” he wrote.
But when you listen without expectations, it doesn’t sound a bit dated or self-indulgent. Which makes sense given Photek emerged as a godfather to the younger dubstep scene. He was way ahead of his time, docked for being an all-star producer crafting music allergic to easy access. More than a decade later, he would return with a host of groundbreaking E.P.‘s and remixes, including a manifesto mix for DJ Kicks in 2012, remapping rhythm in the bass zone, drawing vital connections between acid, breakbeat techno and dubstep, his ‘The Art Of Nothing Pt. 1’ as Parxe, and in collaboration with Alex Metric’s Grincheux, marking another breakthrough.
Still, one can hardly blame those who missed its jagged points. Operandi is no faint-hearted odyssey. It requires patience and concentration — things Confucian cultures practice almost to a fault. Take the patient power of ‘Axiom,’ which bobs like a distant ship in a half-frozen sea, its drums whipping up a snow devil on the ice and holding us in metronomic anticipation. You never hear the steady 4/4. Instead, it flows through like a phantom. Or take ‘Trans 7,’ which bangs at the sky. It is a concussive chain reaction of technoid percussion but rolling and banking with the easy grace of a humpback whale. They’re like koans, confounding yet Zen simple — an intense stillness in the storm. The motion comes from our confusion of time.
Photek signs Operandi off with ‘The Fifth Column,’ a wind tunnel of slamming beats, a final clash to the death and ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’s’ righteous twin — in fact, like a sly tanto or wakizashi blade hidden in his other hand, the Japanese release of the album included his ‘Ni Ten’ masterstroke at its end. Parting with wit, Photek throws us a shuriken star — a fifth column — a grace note of his obsessive genius.
“I made that out of actually flicking one of my fingers, to get that ‘ching!’ metallic sound,” he explained, with one hand transforming human thought. “But to get the sound of one flying, they don’t actually sound like that when they fly, but it’s like in the movies, you have to make the wrong sound to actually get the point across. To make that sound, I got a bicycle break cable, and whirled it around a bit to make that noise, and then I sampled it hundreds of times and put it in a sampler and played it back really fast so it goes ‘Whipwhipwhoopwhup!'” And so the deep fusion goes.
Like that, hyper fast and hyper inventive, Photek stuns the mind, cutting you right open to the flow of time. Over and over, you realize, you’re already dead. The blade has slashed you in two. The ninja’s kick has knocked you off the cliff. The shuriken is already in your chest. It’s electronic reincarnation. The drums break. The beat stops. Then it all flashes back with greater force. The ancient is futuristic once again.
Track Listing:
1. Hidden Camera
2. Smoke Rings
3. Minotaur
4. Aleph 1
5. 124
6. Axiom
7. Trans 7
8. Modus Operandi
9. K.J.Z.
10. The Fifth Column
11. Ni Ten Ichi Ryu*
*The Japanese release of Modus Operandi argues for Parkes’ original intent, given his intense interest in the Japanese audience. It could be that because ‘Ni Ten’ was such an underground sensation that had sold well as a single, that his record company decided to leave it off domestically to drive sales of both formats.
Either way, the Japanese version is the definitive in my opinion, and as the closer, makes for a resounding end to his “Stark Attack!,” as Urb magazine described and titled their feature on Photek in 1997.