Latency

“Electronic music gives you freedom,” Burnt Friedman once told Resident Advisor. ​“The freedom to get rid of musical idioms.” Few artists have embodied that ethos as consistently and convincingly as Friedman—and The Pestle might be the clearest distillation of that mission.

Though presented as an album, The Pestle is, in essence, a reverse-chronological archive: a collection of works composed between 1993 and 2011. It reveals an artist evolving in technique while remaining steadfast in intent—pushing against structure, genre, and expectation with both precision and play.

The more recent pieces on the record showcase Friedman’s signature rhythmic instability—intricately woven textures where acoustic instruments (Hayden Chisholm’s saxophone on ​“Monkhide,” Takeshi Nishimoto’s sarod on the title track) emerge and vanish within dub-wise frameworks of negative space. Emotionally restrained, these tracks resonate through their tactile detail and formal clarity.

Midway through, we encounter two vital works from the ​’90s: ​“Nerfs d’Acier” and ​“Intrication.” Preceding Friedman’s seminal collaboration with Jaki Liebezeit, these pieces feel more raw—terser, electro-centric, and driving. The rhythms remain unorthodox, but there’s a volatility here, a pulse that hints at the early experimentation that would later crystalize into his more disciplined gridless approach.

The closing third offers a glimpse of his surrealist downtempo roots—tracks like ​“Sorcier” and ​“Day In Rho” tapping into the hallucinatory mood of early ​‘90s electronica. Twinkling bells, keening leads, and a heat-haze atmosphere lend these pieces a dreamlike quality, nostalgic yet forward-looking in their abstraction. While some from that era now feel locked in time, Friedman’s hold up with remarkable grace.

Across its duration, The Pestle sketches a portrait of an artist in constant flight from convention. Whether through irregular rhythms, electro-acoustic interplay, or dub-informed spaciousness, Friedman works with one goal in mind: to reimagine the familiar. A singular, essential entry in the Latency catalogue.