JK Flesh


JK Flesh is a moniker of English musician Justin Broadrick employed for his solo work within electronic music. Broadrick's usage of the title spans back to his work in the 1990s with Kevin Martin in Techno Animal, but he first released a solo studio album as JK Flesh in 2012. Unlike Broadrick's most well-known projects, Godflesh and Jesu, his work as JK Flesh is electronic and lacks metal riffs. Over the years, the project has shifted into a more minimal and dub sound while retaining its industrial influences.
As JK Flesh, Broadrick has released three studio albums, five EPs, a split album with Prurient, and a number of remixes.

History

Background

In the early 1990s, Justin Broadrick became interested in producing hip hop and drum and bass music. While this influence is felt in some of his more prominent releases, like in Godflesh's 1991 EP Slavestate and 1992 album Pure, Broadrick fully explored these genres privately in a solo capacity or incorporated the work into his collaborative projects such as Techno Animal with Kevin Martin. A few of these experiments saw release within various compilation albums, others such as his short lived projects Tech-Level 2 and Youpho saw releases on British jungle label Hardleaders. Broadrick himself briefly ran a minimal techno label in the late 90s called Lo Fibre through which he released EPs of his projects Solaris B.C. with Diarmuid Dalton and The Sidewinder with Martin. A portion of this material was rereleased compiled under the name The Lo Fibre Companion on Invisible Records. Broadrick and Dalton would later play together in Jesu and release three albums together as Council Estate Electronics, an analog synthesizer project inspired by Shard End where they grew up in.

Solo releases

In 2009 Broadrick compiled some of the JK Flesh tracks he created from 1997 to 1999 in an album named From Hell released under the title Krackhead, but it wasn't until 2012 that he fully embarked on the project. In an interview, Broadrick estimated around 17,000 electronic tracks that had created between 1990 and 2012 and were sitting in his archives. Regarding JK Flesh's inception, Broadrick said:
JK Flesh was also conceived as the antithesis of Broadrick's more melodically driven electronica project Pale Sketcher, with JK Flesh constituting "the angry, hateful, disenchanted side of electronic beat-driven, bass-driven music". It is also an "electronic continuation" of Greymachine, a "monolith of nasty, bloated sounding shit".
As a project for Broadrick to fully explore niche areas of electronic and dub music, JK Flesh eschews many conventions that he and his listeners had become used to. The project's debut album, Posthuman, still features heavily downtuned guitars, thick distortion, and a bleak mood–aspects all common in Broadrick's other music–but the beats are less industrial and more dance- and techno-oriented. The heavy guitars ultimately weren't his "long term vision for project" though, and were instead added based on the label's suggestion.
JK Flesh's following releases ventured further into extreme distortion and drum and bass with the Nothing Is Free EP and the second album, Rise Above. The EPs Exit Stance and PI04 adopted a more purely techno sound. Following another EP in 2018 titled Wasplike, JK Flesh's third studio album, New Horizon, was released on 28 September 2018.

Influences

Broadrick's electronic work was informed by the early rave parties he attended in the early 90s seeing Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Plastikman and Aphex Twin as well as his friendship with fellow Brummie Karl O'Connor better known as Regis, the head of Downwards Records. Broadrick also went on to call Dillinja his "favorite producer of filthy bass and cutting breakbeats, absolutely direct, textures unlike any, the ultimate DnB producer". Broadrick has also credited Moritz von Oswald's dub techno projects Basic Channel and Maurizio as well as his record label Chain Reaction as a main influence on JK Flesh.
JK Flesh's sound has also been compared to Andy Stott and Ancient Methods.

Discography

Studio albums