American noise veteran Ren Schofield returns with his project Container. He has announced the release of a new EP called Creamer which will be out on August 27th via Drone. According to the press release, it across four sinewy beasts of electro-punk energy uses noise and distortion to create a cathartic, primal frenzy. Title-track is the first excerpt which comes with the official video.
He explains: “The basic idea of the track ‘Creamer’ was rustled up the day before what would turn out to be my last gig for a long time — an appearance at the Static Shock Festival in London in March 2020. Although normally I would spend quite a bit more time refining a track before I’d do it live, I was excited to play what was written of it at this show, as I find sometimes that the ‘test’ of playing something new in front of people can be a good way to find out immediately if it sucks or not. Luckily it felt great to play it and I couldn’t wait to finish writing the whole thing.
Restrictions and lockdowns followed shortly thereafter and I found myself without a place to work on music like I’d used to, and also a lack of time to work on it since I’d now started working a regular job after having all foreseeable live shows cancelled… and so the song went unfinished.
Months of creative frustration followed until after a bit of bouncing around between studios and a jarring run-in with law enforcement I was able to locate a permanent space just two minutes from my house and finally get settled and start working on things properly again. The four tracks on this EP are the immediate result of that, of spending a long stretch of time pent-up musically and then finally being granted a release.
This is also the first Container record not made with the Roland MC-909, a piece of gear which I had loyally used for a solid ten years previously and then savagely turned my back on in favour of a new era with the Digitakt. This change presented a new series of both freedoms and limitations to work with, as well as a bit of a learning curve, but is overall (to me at least) a breath of fresh air. My intentions and goals for this record were to make it way more ‘rock’ oriented than ‘techno’, almost as if it could be a band or adapted by one (albeit a rather non-traditional one), and I wanted to incorporate some potentially awkward sounding time signatures, but do my best to disguise them as something digestible and not without a groove.”