think all these guys are very promising,” he says. “I think that there’s a group of artists who’ve got the potential to go places.” Clearly, all of those artists are simpatico with Darkstar: both sonically ambitious—in more of a “did you hear that detail?” headphone-listening kind of way than the “take out the infrastructure of a city block” basslines of dubstep’s big headliners—and something close to song-oriented. That was true even before Darkstar became a trio and recorded North. “Need You,” a 2008 12-inch on Hyperdub, featured a heavily altered voice burbling over a jaunty little bounce that stayed on the right side of cute. But it came most directly to the fore in late 2009, when Darkstar released the first track they’d recorded for their debut album, “Aidy’s Girl Is a Computer.” “Aidy’s Girl” was somehow both slinky and warm, a hip club jam that a Postal Service fan might go for. It sounded like a big evolutionary step, and Young says he and Whalley perceived it as one straightaway. “We were doing much more song-orientated chord structures, and [our] direction was kind of moving away from dancefloor tracks. We had a group of tracks that were kind of similar to that, but it was quite unsatisfying working on stuff like that, so we changed direction.” What was unsatisfying? “We were just bored
of doing tracks for clubs, really,” Young says. “It wasn’t getting easy, but it was getting monotonous.” Enter James Buttery, Whalley’s old college mate. “We invited him ’round, and we did a Radiohead cover, ‘Videotape,’” Young says. Buttery was in. Radiohead were a primary source of North’s tone. So, Young says, were the xx, North arrives November 2 “a lot of film scores, and random dancefrom Hyperdub. type stuff, anything from techno to house, bits of dubstep, and anything our friends brought around. We swapped a lot of files, know what I mean?” Looming largest of all was David Bowie. “There was a song called ‘Warszawa’ by Bowie that we listened to a lot. On [North], there’s three tracks that are beatless, just unrhythmicaltype soundscapes,” all of them inspired by the first song on side two of Bowie’s 1977 album Low. Also, like the LPs of Bowie’s Berlin era, North is compact. “It’s like a brief snapshot of what was going on,” Young says. “And also, [the albums of ] people around us, and what we’ve been listening to lately, are usually under an hour. We didn’t feel that we needed to expand on 10 tracks; it just felt natural to close it there.”
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