SDK – Going Back to the Unknown

Read Time: 5 mins

Going Back to the Unknown, is the result of a collaboration between post-punk and experimental music pioneer Stano (The Threat), whose anthology Content to Write in I Dine Weathercraft was released on All City’s archival label Allchival in 2018, and singer-songwriter David Kitt (also known as New Jackson).

The project began with a chance encounter that brought the two artists together in Kitt’s studio, where they experimented with layers of guitars, effects, drum machines, recordings and tape delays to create an EP of strange, smudged and frenetic music. It marks Stano’s return to vocal work and adds another dimension to the wonderfully broad output of David Kitt.

Across five tracks, Stano and Kitt preach with madman abandon in a broad church of sonic possibilities, rewarding the headphone listener at every turn. The opener, Too Long Everything Dublin, sets the scene: its scatterbrained rhythmics and waves of reverb-soaked guitars drift left to right across the sound picture. Stano’s gravelled voice laments “Ghost Ships, Ghost Life” over glitches and guitar vamps that recall the angular post-punk funk of bands like Orange Juice or XTC. There’s a faintly hauntological scent of the Bergerac theme about it. The bass pulses steadily, perhaps the only constant in a sea of angular licks and clicks. Clocking in at 14 minutes, Too Long Everything Dublin does what the great Kosmische tracks by bands like Neu! or Ashra do: it goes on and on like a cyclic mantra, a kind of musical edging that takes you to the verge of monotony, playing chicken with your brain, until around nine minutes in, it drops into an odd dub-funk hybrid. All tape echo and L–R pans, as Stano whispers, “Who’s gonna get it now?” the rhythm drifting away into layers of guitar and effects.

Something Missing recalls the sounds of Robert Hood, though chopped, dubbed and squeezed through a Basic Channel sausage machine, with drums played on a half-step. Stano narrates this psychic journey, telling us to “Always remember” — a visitor from another dimension, a sage through the mirrorglass of dub. His voice snakes through the tape delay, a serpentine spectre rising, distorting, fading away. Around four minutes in, everything changes; the grid shifts, and we find ourselves drowning in a world of cold Casio digi-dub, its loop slightly out of whack, disjointed and out of time, switching rhythms with utter disregard for any grid.

Ogygia ushers in a warmer, more melodic vision. Shades of early Autechre are deftly combined with a droning violin that’s as strange and discordant as it is beautiful. In keeping with Stano’s tape-recording backstory, I’ll make an educated guess that this is a field recording of sorts — perhaps some kind of folk music? It doesn’t feel as though it was recorded for the piece, right or wrong, the tonality and atonality of the violin merges beautifully with ghostly Eno-esque pads to create something rich and moving with a heart full of glitches.

Stano and David Kitt

The warm, nostalgia-tinged emotion doesn’t last long, as the unrelenting kick drum and rhythmic noise of Towns Being Ripped Apart start up. Stano’s vocals, in backwards-forwards formation, ask “How do you know where you are?”, its a good question. This is techno music at its most Krautrock — abandoned-warehouse incantations climbing endlessly like Sisyphus until they collapse into strange signals and drones. The journey is everything.

Going Back to the Unknown ends with Fireworks, where the previously mentioned Eno-esque pads return, hauntingly layered over a half-step rhythm of kicks and flanger-soaked snares. These glitch into strange polyrhythms, with the melody acting as the anchor for rhythmic flourishes. Over time, the pads transform into something altogether different — an organ, perhaps, some seaside optimism from a bygone era. Traces of another world, heard through one of Stano’s tape recorders. This eerie nostalgia evokes comparisons with compositions by Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange, or The Caretaker, but dragged kicking and screaming into a twisted acid future by Kitt.

This sense of timelessness runs like a river through Going Back to the Unknown. It’s neither nostalgic nor futuristic, instead flickering between worlds — like a Pepper’s Ghost illusion projected onto the present. At times, it feels politically charged; track titles such as Too Long Everything Dublin and Towns Being Ripped Apart seem to allude to the current state of affairs in Tech-Ireland™. Kitt, after all, has been very outspoken about the housing crisis and the government’s role in it. Whatever it is, there’s something in the sound of Going Back to the Unknown that reeks of frustration and discomfort, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. Let’s hope they make a follow-up.

Going Back to the Unknown is released on 6 October 2025 via All City.

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