In the five years that they’ve been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They’ve never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum’n’bass. On their 2023 debut album, Signs, glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year’s Faith was even more ethereal; the trio’s individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.
Anyone who has seen Purelink live, however, knows how much physical heft they’re capable of conjuring—a bold, bassy throb that sets bodies in motion even in the absence of obvious dance-music signifiers. Their sets may begin in the muggy tropics of their recorded work, but they turn into full-on affairs. A new live cassette stakes out a position somewhere in the middle of Purelink’s opposing tendencies, balancing their ambient inclinations with heavyweight bass and some surprisingly forceful rhythms.
Rather than replicating a particular show in its entirety, Live is collaged together out of discrete moments from the trio’s 2024 U.S. tour. That means that its structure doesn’t really replicate the forward motion of their shows; instead, it wanders a little, more like a mixtape, but that sensation of drift is also part of its charm.
Side A begins with nearly eight minutes of shape-shifting ambience—fuzzed-out chords, rapid-fire trills, the clatter of what sound like small objects being jostled together. The mood is emotionally ambiguous, and adaptable to your own state of mind—chilled or faintly chilling, depending. Things soon intensify with the entrance of thudding kick-drum patterns, while convoluted delay chains beckon down dubby rabbit holes.
The A-side’s untitled selections are said to be versions of Signs tracks as well as remixes of songs by friends and peers, but given the gaseous sprawl and blunted mood, it would be hard to identify anything with much certainty. As tracks morph from skeletal dub techno to scratchy IDM, certain sounds repeat themselves: a faraway whistle, like a train in the distance; a quick metallic oscillation, like a coin spinning on a countertop. But there’s no knowing where a given sound comes from; is that a contact-miked yo-yo, an electric toothbrush, a cello (all devices they’ve described using in the studio)?
The B-side gathers a selection of unreleased material, and much of it unexpectedly songful. It’s still ambient, still built atop minimalist drum patterns, still swathed in seemingly endless reverb and delay. But this time, the dub basslines are more pronounced, and some of the group’s instruments assume sharper focus: electric guitar and bass, piano, even what I think might be a saxophone. Many of these tracks show a considerable debt to the atmospheric post-rock of the Kranky label, and even to Tortoise—both reminders of Purelink’s own Chicago roots.
In these more melodic moments, Live suggests as-yet-unexplored directions for Purelink. The horizontal boom-bap of the B-side’s conclusion is a particularly intriguing proposition. But the album’s most unexpected moment comes three quarters of the way through the A-side. On initial listens, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing; it sounded like weeping, which seemed an odd and disturbing choice for such otherwise laid-back music. Only on subsequent repeats did I realize that the sound is actually the slowed-down laughter of someone absolutely losing their mind. Listen closely, and a short story reveals itself: “Come on, guys,” pleads a different slowed-down voice, sounding peeved. “You can’t be smoking a J on your way to a school soccer game!” The laughing voices—the J-smokers, presumably—offer their apologies before collapsing back into breathless giggles. (“Smoking a J,” one of them snickers, barely able to contain her amusement at the reprimand.) I have no idea what the backstory of this exchange might be, or what it has to do with Purelink. But in the context of Live, it’s a reminder that, however skilled they may be at reducing their music to an abstract blur, they’ve also got some delightful surprises up their sleeve.
