Revisit everything you thought you knew about how your record collection slots together and begin to look at how it is all linked.

Production Unit‘s latest album is called There Are No Shortcuts In A Grid System and this could be a way of looking at the interconnected-ness of everything you have loved over the last 20-30 years. Your Public Enemy records sit alongside your Coil records which in turn sit beside your collections of Planet E, Mo Wax and Metalheadz 12s; the link is you.

There Are No Shortcuts is an album that collects fragments from all areas of the musical spectrum and pulls them together to make something brand new and yet familiar opening with a simple motif that goes way back to the heady days of rock and roll 1 2 3 4! albeit in a more hypnotic tone that could be designed to hypnotize you and prepare you for the journey you are about to embark on.

Over the course of an hour the album unfolds into a wide, open landscape. Each track is remixed from the preceding track in a kind of Chinese whispers of styles, tones, sounds and textures that takes in slo mo techno, ambient glitches, hip hop and more. It really needs to be heard to see how well it all fits together.

The album from Glasgow’s Dave Donnelly aka Production Unit was always intended to be released on tape.

It was composed as two sides of blended music comprised of individual tracks with strong common themes, but the crisp highs and deep lows caused label boss TVO to put his foot down, demanding a digital-only format that allowed the precision to sing.

This mirrors the way the album itself evolved organically: “Each track is a remix of its preceding track,” writes the artist. “I was trying to figure out a way of building a narrative, and of glueing the whole thing together sonically, and this seemed liked the perfect way to do both. As a result I think it flows, and that was important: not just to curate a collection of tracks but to chart the progression of an idea.”

Broken20 release There Are No Shortcuts In A Grid System tomorrow, November 19th. Both digitally and in a highly limited collector’s edition; featuring custom USB drive, art prints, trinkets together with download codes for extensive exclusive content.

Grab

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Production Unit – Counting Steps Intro
Production Unit – Further Uncounted Steps
Production Unit – Third Step
Production Unit – Fourth and Final Step
Production Unit – The Next Step
Production Unit – The Next Ish 05:38
Production Unit – Ishoos
Production Unit – No Grid Perhaps
Production Unit – No Grid For Sure
Production Unit – Nothing Is Sure
Production Unit – Nothing Is True
Production Unit – Everything Is Permitted
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