Sam Shackleton (UK)

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SHACKLETON Sam Shackleton was born in Lancashire, England. He has participated in various
music projects over the years, playing as a teenager in punk bands and later performing as part of a dancehall duo with Earl Fontainelle (aka Vengeance Tenfold). He started producing music on computers in 2003, at a time when he was becoming familiar with grime and dubstep thanks to meetings with Laurie Osborne (aka Appleblim). In 2005 he founded the Skull Disco record label
with Appleblim, on behalf of which ten LPs will be released in the dubstep movement. However, the two co-founders quickly departed from the dubstep groove in vogue at the time, with increasingly aggressive and oscillating bass sounds, looking for something deeper, stranger and
more experimental. Additionally, tracks like Shackleton’s “Blood on My Hands” – which was
famously remixed in 2007 by techno minimal pioneer Ricardo Villalobos – pushed things further, inadvertently laying the foundations for the countless dubstep-techno hybrids that arose at the end
of the 2000s and early 2010s The Skull Disco label closed in 2008, but by that time Shackleton was already charting his own personal path through the use of complex percussive layers with rhythmic patterns from Africa, the Middle East, from India, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. In the same year Shackleton moved to Berlin where he released the album Three EPs from Perlon, a label
known in the field of minimal techno. His next work, 2012’s Music For The Quiet Hour / The
Drawbar Organ EPs, was a monumental 137-minute work in which he pushed his complex rhythm structures and dubby explorations much further than before. Over the past ten years, he has continued to design his unique sound world with great personality, straddling the electronic and
experimental spheres by producing a series of collaborative LPs, with Don Pinch, Ernesto Tomasini, Vengeance Tenfold, Anika and Waclaw Zimpel.