Originally released in the late 90s on Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald’s legendary Chain Reaction label, »Landlocked« is now being pressed on double vinyl for the first time. Initially issued on CD, the album collected tracks that had previously appeared across various 12-inches.

Much of the writing surrounding the culture of what would later be considered ›dub techno‹ and its primary distribution centre, Hard Wax, leads one down roads of shifting primary sources and decades-old, overheard smoke-break recollections. Maybe brevity primes the listener for the paralinguistic, to approach the sound on its own terms, focusing on how things are uttered and not what.

This theory will remain unconfirmed. Hallucinator’s original press release left us with three or so gestures to consider over the years since:

»A new act on Chain Reaction’s distinct productional thesis. Hallucinator are three people from the UK/London and this their first release ever – that’s all what the artists want to let us know... This record is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Lawrence.«

The first gesture is one of personnel. Since ’99, we’ve got to learn a bit more about the artists behind the Hallucinator project. All London-based, all writers, composers, and sound designers: Anna Piva, Edward George, and Trevor Mathison. These three seem to flow between parameters as an aesthetic tactic and tacit structure of the work itself. For example, other collaborative shapes have emerged from this line-up, including Flow Motion (Piva, George, and Mathison), as well as the now-defunct Black Audio Film Collective, of which George and Mathison are founding members.

The second gesture is in the second line of the previous press release: »distinct productional thesis«. Much of »Landlocked«’s affect and sequencing seems to suggest an emotional study of entropy at the level of sediment. Rhythms play with space and capacity through polyvalence. The production chooses subtractive vertigo, often switching elements out and bringing them back after they vanished from the track six minutes ago. Dubbing out so much of a track, one begins to associate sound with memories held in the experience of running your hand across a concrete block as a child. Felt (re)membrance in lieu of a narrative tale. Using textures that flicker between colour and percussion, Hallucinator’s 12-track album of loudspeaker-perception music might be a meditation on the psychic wake of the Cold War. Intermittent strata of ambience and groove convect an active-margin rifting event underneath a scorched geology of power in Western Europe. Again, this is all grapevine hearsay.

But it’s silence that voices the third gesture. The album’s sparse application of the written word touches on the ennui paradox of being landlocked on an island. Stuck. Trapped in the psychosis of occidental hypercentrism. A looping silence of Black British tragedy: »to the memory of Stephen Lawrence«. Eighteen-year-old Lawrence was stabbed to death at a bus stop in southeast London by six white men in 1993. The rift of grief and implicit reiteration of modern subordination left by this hate crime remained legally silent for almost two decades, until Lawrence’s killers were ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012. Only six years removed at the time of Hallucinator’s initial invocation of rememory, the mind-numbing accretion of what Black Studies professor Denise Ferreira da Silva might call »unpayable debt« finds demonic ground across »Landlocked«, forming an aural sense of what continues to be refused.

The album ventures through spaces of overactive non-happenings: »Red Angel«’s factory-floor dub flashes between smokestack and jungle visions, while the stilted breath of »Dusk« at the halfway mark lends its mood to the sort of sedated dreams built from daily life under colonial rule, for instance. That linked rhythm links us back to our linked fates across Black and Brown folk is real; thus, the syncopated signals throughout this work behave on the level of transnational radiotelegraphy, sounding out the windswept tension of a body negotiating a meat-grinder schema of linear production and wage, for others to know that an unspeakable thing can be broadcast in every drum tongue.

As the silence continues to reverberate, we return to the sort of meaning-making that cannot be told but felt. Soothing to some, disturbing to others. »Landlocked«, a Rorschach test for a crumbled empire.

Credits: Written and produced by Hallucinator Trevor Mathison, Anna Piva and Edward George Originally released by Chain Reaction 1998-1999 Originally mastered by Moritz von Oswald Remastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk 2025 Artwork by Ben Drury Words by Ryan C. Clarke Published by BCP NMBRS75 ℗ + © Numbers 2025