Through the seminal Vex’d project Roly Porter and Jamie Teasdale arguably created one of dubstep’s most distinctive offshoots, fusing the rough beats of grime with frenzied hints of industrial and the fierce precision of UK bass production. Their landmark album Degenerate released in 2004 created a defiant manifesto of pure low-end terror that injected a rugged warlike intent into that undercurrent of emerging music. Alongside this the project contributed significantly to the interweaving of dubstep and techno in the mid 00′s. Though intriguingly unlike most dubstep strands that fell in line more easily with Basic Channel and the Berlin based Hardwax lineage, Vex’d seemed much more suited to a British interpretation, getting regular play from Surgeon and contributing to the cult Birmingham label Dynamic Tension affiliated with Regis’ Downwards imprint.

By the beginning of 2007 Vex’d had been disbanded for the duo to explore their own individual production routes with releases appearing over the years on both Tectonic and Planet Mu. However 2011 demonstrated the ultimate parallel expression of this bifurcation through the emergence of Porter’s vanguard Aftertime and Teasdales’s adept synth infused long player Severant, produced under his Kuedo pseudonym. Whilst both albums evidently occupy separate worlds, Aftertime stretching into shadowy orchestration and muscular sonics and Severant drawing on the emotional depths of synthesized sound, both albums nonetheless share a central duality. This manifests through the exploration of the primary contrasting of elegance and frailty with a toughened almost thugged out forcefulness. In Porter’s Aftertime the delicate tones of the Ondes Martinot, a rare electronic instrument employed by serialist composers Boulez and Messiaen, sits alongside raw bass tones, shards of noise and juddering snatches of Public Enemy vocals. Whilst simultaneously Severant adapts the deeply emotional synth tropes of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and overlays them onto punchy MPC style beats inherent to low slung US hip-hop production. This tense contrasting approach, an almost beauty and the beast aesthetic, is ultimately what gives both of these albums their distinctly human core located amidst the encircling clouds of electronics. An atmosphere of exposed delicacy continually under threat, an inescapable truth engrained within the fundamental order of Nature.

It’s a rare occasion for a seminal project to disband and its key members to emerge in the same year with landmark albums, and it goes without saying that the emergence of Porter and Teasdale as fully realised singular voices is an area significantly worthy of investigation by anyone remotely interested in the evolution of British underground music.