Rkss

Robin Buckley, recording and performing under the rkss alias from a London base, produces experimental electronic music that dismantles core components of EDM and club culture. The 2018 album DJ Tools, for example, takes mainstream dance-music sounds and reshapes them into abstract works through processing methods typical of academic computer-music practice.

German-born rkss began issuing hazy, abstract techno in 2012. After the EPs Basement and the 2013 release Submerged, Reject and Fade issued the 2014 cassette-and-zine package Tunnel, whose tracks were assembled from found video clips; Seagrave followed with Cell in 2015. On Where to Now? the 2016 album Top Charted tested trance and EDM materials, while the Alien Jams EP Cutoff presented house abstractions influenced by Theo Parrish and DJ Sprinkles. In 2017 rkss issued the electroacoustic work Brostep in the Style of Florian Hecker, built with consumer software ordinarily employed for dubstep, and simultaneously released a companion video game designed by Calum Gunn (Acrnym). UIQ, the label run by Lee Gamble, put out DJ Tools in 2018—an album constructed solely from the sample pack EDM Kicks, Vol. 1, with its track titles taken verbatim from the product’s typo-filled sales sheet. Around the same period rkss also released the bootleg edit collection DJ Tools (Illegal Material), featuring reworkings of dance-pop tracks by the Vengaboys, Daft Punk, and Underworld.