Showerhead

Searching follows last year’s Flow Velocity / 107 Ambience, itself a light and dark, A-side/B-side excursion bearing the hallmarks of the sounds that Showerhead has cultivated since 2019’s Travelogue. Where Flow’s almost bullet-hell-adjacent breakbeat workout showcased an extravaganza of sampling, it found suitable counterpoint with 107’s more contemplative IDM pacing, composure and atmospheric harmony.

Searching builds upon the scope of that two-tracker, and across its runtime it meanders into a more expansive, fully realised territory. Much as the Showerhead releases to date have sought to explore and take a unique styling on the hallmarks on electro, ambient and breakbeat, Searching instills an essence that equal-parts colourful, heavily rhythmic and, as per the name, seeking something expressive, a somewhat tricky path to navigate in an IDM space more often than not characterised by an abiding coldness and austerity.

Of course, those signifiers and textural details of note and allure abound: the tell-tale 303 acid bleeps and thundering 808 kicks; all manner of breakbeats and pitched vocals; shimmering synth pads, plucky arpeggios and staccato piano chords. Perhaps one aspect of what has characterised Showerhead’s productions to this point is the layering of these sounds in a sonic space that retains depth and focus, even given the myriad details. Searching demonstrates that even though many of these gestures and ambiences bear nostalgic weight and nods to the past, there is ample space and possibility for novel slants to be taken, if handled with dexterity and balance.

After the briefest of introductions, the no-mess-about opener ‘Fizz Widget’ gets straight to it, its breakbeats and slams underpinned by vocal stutters and synth glimmers. But to counterpoint this, the electro-ambience of ‘Fossil’ unfurls with a patience, and an insistence, allowing the space for its highly evocative, distinct harmonious resonance to fully bloom. The title track, ‘Rhizome’ and ‘Flying High’ float somewhere between these two dimensions, be they branching into more acidic jaunts or sunlit, closing-time wind-downs – but they take a slightly different approach, centring back to a coherent point of control.

Given this, despite the space covered on and wound back into this neat miscellanea of electronica, IDM and breakbeats, every aspect of this remarkably spotless record bears the unmistakable aura of a Showerhead production. It speaks to the spirit of Searching, perhaps, figuratively and literally; following one’s imagination, seeking to find fullness and nuance in what is by now a well-trodden path, but returning back to something to share. A thoroughly consistent continuation of Showerhead’s work until now and a vital extension to a growing catalogue, Searching is electronica at its most classically redolent: nostalgia-encoded and future-fixed, and glistening with detail and intrigue.

- Notes from Nico Callaghan