Rival Consoles

Rival Consoles produces driving experimental dance music from England, relying mainly on analog gear to shape his sound. Across multiple phases his style moved from the demanding IDM heard on initial EPs toward overtly club-focused electro-house statements such as the 2011 album Kid Velo, then grew steadily more conceptual; Howl in 2015 assembled elaborate pieces from a deliberately narrow sonic palette, while Overflow in 2021 examined technology and social media. Now Is, issued in 2022, merges acoustic and electronic instruments within a refined ambient-minimalist framework.

Ryan Lee West entered the world on November 10, 1985, in Leicester, England. He first appeared on Erased Tapes Records in 2007 under the Aparatec alias, issuing the glitchy acid-tinged Vemeer EP. Later that year he introduced the Rival Consoles name with the Decadent EP, whose galloping breakbeats supported increasingly intricate and dramatic synthesizer lines and structures. The 2009 7" EP Helvetica sustained this harder-edged IDM approach. The same year also brought two more dancefloor-directed projects: the split EP 65/Milo with Kiasmos and his debut full-length IO, which received considerable praise. He supplied remixes for fellow Erased Tapes artists including Nico Muhly, Codes in the Clouds, and Canon Blue.

His second album, Kid Velo, reached listeners in 2011 and showed West sharpening a luminous electro-house aesthetic that increasingly echoed Ed Banger Records acts such as Justice. The 2013 Odyssey EP adopted a more minimal and experimental tone than the preceding LPs. Sonne, released the following year, pursued that course further and incorporated West’s own acoustic guitar and drumming. Erased Tapes combined the two vinyl EPs for a 2015 CD edition while West toured alongside Clark and Nosaj Thing and prepared his third album. Howl appeared in October 2015, built from inventive arrangements that drew on only a handful of layers of his instrumental performances. After the end of a thirteen-year relationship, he issued the mini-album Night Melody in August 2016. Persona, named after the Ingmar Bergman film, followed in 2018; although it contained occasional dance numbers, the record emphasized ambient, modern-classical, and shoegaze elements. Articulation, derived from graphic scores West himself had drawn, came out in 2020. Originally scored for a dance work by choreographer Alexander Whitley, the 2021 album Overflow critiques social media, advertising, marketing, and data exploitation. The polished ambient-techno set Now Is surfaced in 2022.