Fabricated and refined over the last few years, 'Cicada Burnt' is Leo's most kinetic offering to date, a suite of freewheeling percussive experiments that situate themselves furtively in the murky musical backdrop of northern England. Each track crackles and pulses with rust-caked post-industrial energy, shifting, shaking and convulsing from Sheffield through Rochdale all the way to Salford, merging hallucinatory polyrhythms with grimy bassline memories, overdriven D&B rasps with dembow syncopations and squelchy acid sequences with eerie cybernetic pads. 'Cicada Burnt' is, at its core, vintage electro for dancers, shaped from the remnants of 16-step drum machine cycles and neck-snapping two-note basses, but Leo works into that raw material by hand with the benefit of time and distance, tweaking and twisting the rhythms to blur the line between a spectrum of overlapping club expressions.
Leo's third album proper, the record follows a run of infamous deployments for Manchester's YOUTH and Tom Boogizm's $hotta Tapes that have already established him as a skilled sound designer who's able to bolt from spiky hardcore to Drexciyan techno without breaking a sweat. And 'Cicada Burnt' materialized as he sharpened his live set, playing routinely at cult Manchester institutions The White Hotel, N/OM and Impiety Hour (fka Peste) against visuals from Sean Clarke, who also handles the album's artwork. It's this context that lends the album its dynamic energy; long before Leo established himself as a producer he was a drummer, and there's a similar dexterity to his structures as twitchy sequences evolve into impromptu fills and veer off the expected grid. Live electronic music is too often bogged down by lofty concepts and technical limitations, so Leo beds the bullshit, zeroing in on the groove itself.
He unhurriedly presents his raw sounds on 'Qwershape', stressing swinging hits and doom-y bass smacks that echo through recent history. Filling the negative space with dubwise feedback trails and prickly melodic remnants, Leo establishes a tableau where rhythm is confidently in the foreground. And that mood is only cultivated further on 'Jetti', via a roll of unstable syncopated kicks and fractal Detroit-via-Sheffield pads that Leo smudges almost beyond recognition, creating a mercurial feet-forward techno hybrid that breathes damp Northern air. The title track meanwhile singles out D&B's most ominous qualities, retaining the retching distortion while rejecting the usual aggression. But it's on the two 'Spirit Level' tracks that Leo really gets to flex, using the slow-burning prescript to establish his unexpected Ligeti-like theme before introducing a whirring, constantly-shifting rhythm that bends in on itself like a möbius strip.
It closes an album that ties the UK's complex club music narrative in knots without ever ripping it from its roots. And at a time when the scene is being transformed and co-opted by malign gentrifying forces hell-bent on cheap nostalgia, 'Cicada Burnt' serves as a timely reminder of the lively and eccentric working class dancehalls and nightclubs where it all began.
