Stewart is known for his technical ability to blend unexpected sounds across a wide variety of genres into tracks that surprise and amaze all at the same time. His most recent release, Human Energy, is in some ways progressive but lighter, warmer, and features a variety of guests.

While it may have disappointed some of the harsher critics, Human Energy offers unique insight into Stewart’s personal life and is likely to gain mainstream attention.

“The album reflects a period of great change in my life,” Stewart said of Human Energy. “I moved across the country to a new city, I proposed to the girl of my dreams, I moved into a new house, bought a brand new computer, and set off to write a new album.”

But I digress. If you’ve ever seen Machinedrum live, you know he carries and shares a lot of positive energy. Stewart is visibly, genuinely excited while playing music, which makes being a part of his live show somewhat special.

Set in front of a video screen made to look like a home, Machinedrum played out tracks from Human Energy mixed in with some of his older productions. The visual accompaniment was reflective of the album art – light, bright, pink – “come in through my door, peek into my window, dance on my front lawn.”

Stewart’s set started fairly late and took the crowd into last call, but no one complained. There were head bops, nods, and dance moves of all sorts, with eyes permanently aimed at the man on the stage.

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Perhaps it’s unfair to generalize, but there are a lot — A LOT — of electronic acts out there doing roughly the same thing in roughly the same way. Like any genre in music popular enough to spawn a scene, electronic dance has blown up to the point that unless you have a distinct sound or visual gimmick, you’ll blend in rather than stick out.

North Carolina’s Travis Stewart, better known as Machinedrum, lives in a bubble between the genre’s major acts and the periphery. This offbeat collection adds to his mystique, but doesn’t cement his rep either in or outside of the top tier of producers.

Machinedrum played a raucous set at What The Festival 2015 with Vapor City Live. And given the variety of work on Human Energy, he has a solid sense of how to craft interesting soundscapes.

The album is uneven: overly familiar in some spots, but completely thrilling in others. Guest vocals help differentiate some tracks —“Dos Puertas”, for example, fluctuates between buildups and gently vocally inflected beats before settling into a near-breathless rap from Kevin Hussein. It’s a series of teases, building toward drops that only half-arrive.

Likewise, “Morphozine” chimes and churns under Ruckazoid’s simple vocal, but really works best during the brief drum-n-bass inspired bits punctuated by quick synth chirps. Both tracks are good, but don’t quite elevate the collection beyond much of what you’d hear elsewhere.

“Ocean of Thought” recalls the ‘80s/‘90s heyday of Art of Noise, its sampled vocal from an old movie drifting in and out of center. It never quite gets where it’s trying to go.

Machinedrum fares much better with tracks like “Spectrum Sequence”, splitting the difference between Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor”, Ken Nordine’s spoken-word jazz stylings, and old-school Kraftwerk. The track feels throwaway at first but sticks with you, especially as it segues into “White Crown” (featuring Tosin Abasi). The track’s stunted arpeggios harken back to Frank Zappa’s Synclavier work on Jazz From Hell, but have a dancefloor snap that wouldn’t have occurred to FZ. It’s still not something you’d hear at a club, but it’s got a distinct sound. Likewise, “Colour Communicator” works best when it eschews big beats and goes its own way into more avant-garde, Zappa-esque territory.

When electronic music producers release albums — collections of songs rather than mixtapes — the results are often misunderstood. To this reviewer’s ear, many of those collections serve as samplers for what’s to come at live sets — snippets of a much larger, more inclusive whole. Taken as such, Machinedrum’s Human Energy has a lot to offer and suggests sets with variety and unusual flavor. But if you listen to the album looking for a suite of songs that coalesce into a larger whole, your mileage may vary.

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Independent hip-hop label, Big Dada, have recently released a new collaborative project to help warm our souls this coming winter – the Maskya EP. In a nutshell, the Maskya EP is a short remix project with reggae/electronic sound, a hard-hitting base and Caribbean riddim that combines the skills of three talented musicians: SK Simeon, Yaw Faso, and the producer Machinedrum (real name Travis Stewart).

Machinedrum is the true star of the project, which seems to serve more as a showcase of the producer’s talents than that of a cohesive album. Machinedrum has produced and remixed many songs over this past year and is emerging as a premier instrumentalist on the Ninja Tune roster. Stewart contributes to the EP with his inventive future bass sound: a heavy dose of fast-paced, often erratic percussion within intricate electronic instrumentals, with a touch of hip-hop flavor, and incorporates the reggae stylings of his contemporaries to create an impressive set of dancehall-type tracks.

SK Simeon and Yaw Faso are Melbourne based MC’s with strong Afro-reggae-hip-hop influence, not to insinuate that their music is in anyway similar. Their interpretations on this EP are exponentially different to the other thanks to Machinedrum’s individualistic approach that I believe adds a well-needed element to each song. SK Simeon’s “Doper Than Dope” and “Ram Dancehall” are stylized purely as dancehall bangers, raunchy tunes with repetitive lyrics and insanely hard base that you would imagine hearing in a nightclub.

Yaw Faso’s tracks “All of Mi Life” and “Memories,” on the other hand, are both bombastic, upbeat reggae melodies centered on his rhythm and prominent lyrics that Machinedrum highlights with considerably less base and a slower tempo, night and day in comparison to the tracks of his counterpart. Stewart does an excellent job on these remixes by successfully integrating his trademark sound to the theme of reggae/dancehall all while demonstrating his tremendous ability and range. 

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Now based in Berlin, the North Carolina native is infamous for his ever-shifting identity and electronic music powerhouse title.  Here he uses a special blend of knowledge, experience and technique to deliver his hand-crafted sound.

The first single, “Eyesdontlie,” is a hard and trippy first look at dreamland. After an overly cacophonous preamble, the track progresses with what might be a bit too much jarring repetition, but let’s face it, that’s the effect he’s going for; a modern take on early 90s synth-y electronica. What’s to love about this track is the breakdown halfway through – ethereal acid house replaces robotic vocals in a moment of clarity, a la Underworld. It’s both varied and lush, metallic and old school.

B-side “Body Touch” is at first understated and yet is perhaps the better track of the two after a few listens. A slightly more laid back version of “Eyesdontlie”, not without a dash of hip hop and sleazy vocals, it seeps into your very being, willing you to dance the night away in Stewart’s haunting dream world.

Both songs feature outstanding production quality, distinctly Ninja Tune, and a sound which still manages to seem fresh and relevant among the millions of electronic tracks found in the universe.

While it seems Machinedrum has been merely playing with different mixes and sounds since his last full-length album, it’s obvious that his experiments have finally come to fruition. If this is any indication of what’s to come, we can’t wait to hear the rest.

Release date: July 29, 2013

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