Guilt Attendant - Suburban Scum (2020)

Nathaniel Young a.k.a. Guilt Attendant lives and works in NYC, where he also produces music under the monikers Hofmann, Kohl, Moral Extrication and richard_p, and runs the Severed Mercies and Blankstairs platforms for art and music alongside his design duties for Dais and Hospital Productions among many other publications and labels.
‘Suburban Scum’ is his devilishly detailed debut of girder-strength techno for Hospital Productions, forged in the image of late ‘90s hard techno and reverberating strongly with prevailing trends. It’s inspired and informed by the artist’s deeply held urge to undo the dogma instilled by his religious Christian upbringing. and, as such, it expresses a sense of free will within the context of Satan’s fall from grace, fully grasping techno’s repetitive excess as a potential path to hedonism, freedom and other ungodly matters.
Recorded between 2016-2019, the 8 tracks of ’Suburban Scum’ find Guilt Attendant in cold control of his agency. While they may possibly make crowds consider their own relationship to god, especially in his use of sampled sermons by his former preacher that crop up throughout, and most strikingly on the closing ’Severe Mercy’, the majority are more likely to make dancers slam the walls and trample a hole in the ‘floor, especially with the galloping horsepower traction of ‘Broken (Free)’ and his scudding 140bpm missile ‘Cursed Spawn of White Flight’, while the title track deals in purely clenched EBM and the dread-filled palpitations of ‘Imminent Unraveling’ features his vocals low in the mix and wrapped around the track’s rugged spine.
While there’s a certain irony in eschewing one dogma to embrace another, Guilt Attendant utilises the inherently principled form of hard techno as a steely framework in which to explore his own spirit. In the process he opens a derelict warehouse-like playground to reflect on key themes of moral independence, social segregation, free will, blissful despair and decisive autonomy (from
a much longer list) that patently apply to popular conceptions of the dancefloor as “church” and techno as ritual.