One of the biggest influences on this kind of music was Public Enemy. Kevin Martin, who was active in the scene as a member of GOD and Techno Animal and now records as The Bug, told Reynolds that he was inspired by how the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee built his songs not as unfolding scrolls but as skyscrapers of sound—his “production situates a song’s dynamic in the vertical, not the horizontal,” as Reynolds summarized it. “Postscript” may be the most obvious example, but much of Beat is assembled this way. While the buildings Public Enemy erected tended to stomp around like Howl’s Moving Castle, Beat gleams with the elegant curves of the proposed Sarcostyle Tower—a nearly human specter of up-arching twists and eventual resolution.
In this way, the contemporary record it most resembles is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… Both records expose the arcane inner workings of a form so popular its norms could be taken for granted. Shadow’s deconstructed hip-hop removed the human element and turned the music’s infrastructure into its primary feature, his busy and upbeat percussion never overtaking the album’s overall feeling of foreboding.
Beat operates in much the same way and to the same effect. It’s hard to call the finished product a landmark, because this is an album that sometimes seems as if it doesn’t want to be seen at all, much less identified as a wayfinder. But by combining shoegaze and post-rock and trip-hop and ambient, and doing so in a way that feels like a unified whole, they made a space for themselves that wasn’t quite like anything else happening in this extremely fertile moment in alternative and indie rock history.
Though the post-rock of Bowery Electric’s era had little to do with what the term would come to signify, you can hear faint echoes of them in the bands now more closely associated with the term. Mogwai, who would make their debut the year after Beat was released and with whom Bowery Electric would share a bill, would crouch in similarly unassuming and tense postures and use them to spring out and scare the bejeezus out of people. The unsettled pessimism of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F♯ A♯ ∞ and Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada seem to draw from the same emotional bank as many of the drones Chandler sends like a scud across the album’s sky. In the heavy fold of Beat’s translucent drapery, you can feel the fibers of an idea Sigur Rós would spin less than a decade later on ( ).
Beat shows how so many of the sounds that were prevalent in the mid-’90s contained a unique, end-of-the century sadness. The human, the recognizable, is abstracted, and while it cuts deep, it’s rarely cause for excitement. The 10 tracks here all feel like they take place in still, solitary moments: a city at 4:30 a.m., a lonely bedroom, an office at night, a vacant warehouse. In other words, it’s music made for places where people should be but aren’t. At a time when the nascent internet promised to bring people closer together than ever, it captures something of the pessimism many were already feeling about human connection. It has the brain of dance music, but it won’t move your body. It has the sexy texture of trip-hop, but it leaves you with no erotic charge. Its squalls are as big as those of shoegaze, but you could never get lost in them. Listening to Beat, you are exposed. Which is to say, you can only be sure of what you are not.
