I can mark time by Fresh Meat’s records. I’ve written more about this label than any other, and the last five or six years has seen the beginning and end of relationships, friendships, personal habits and professional failures. This is a label that’s been next to me for a lot of those milestones. It’s an unusual thing to say about a dance music label, but Fresh Meat has always seemed beyond that sort of thing, with artist releases so eclectic and of such quality that you can feel the invisible hand of curation at work. Every release feels like a record selected by a friend.
The latest selection is made up of three love songs from an industrial age presented by Lee Mills. All play with rougher sounds – the hammer of hard chords and dreamy synth waves, sometimes together. The title track has a crazy distinctive buzz sound that evolves into the tantrum of a temperamental 303 – the regular repeating tone evokes something like the first clear recording of a mysterious Russian numbers station known as UVB-76 that’s been broadcasting mysterious audio tones 25 times a minute 24 hours a day for the last 30 years. Fresh Meat has been straddling a line between House and Techno for awhile, and so does Lee Mills, with percussion so clear it sounds like a kit is up in each headphone cup.
