Motor Cortex Stimulation

Five years can change both the sound and the person on the other side of the studio monitors. Work on Motor Cortex Stimulation began in 2015, before Psycho Breaks was finished. One album was finding its final form while another body of music was already accumulating beside it: more controlled, more demanding of detail, and still unwilling to settle within a single genre.

Released in February 2020, All Out’s second album keeps that restlessness. Twenty-five compositions move between expansive big beat, heavy broken rhythms, drum and bass and melodic departures. Short pieces flare up and give way; longer ones allow a stay inside a mood. The changing scale carries an impatience to speak in several musical languages without turning any of them down.

The producer’s listening was changing too. Hybrid’s melodic depth, The Crystal Method’s force, Current Value’s heavy electronics and Jon Hopkins’s different sense of space coexisted among his listening interests. Between those attachments was room to find something personal. The old school remained a foundation, but no longer marked the limits.

Earlier music never disappears completely. The Ravers, The Wormhole and Into The Storm return in Cortex versions, like familiar places encountered years later. The title theme reaches back to original work from 2009, while The Energy Performance continues the work on The Aluminium Tough’s Lunar Express. Metal Bite retains a collaboration with Frank Mockery’s guitarist; Something About You began with the band’s vocalist, though its album form leaves the voice behind. The new forms preserve memories of people and earlier ideas.

Towards the end of the album’s creation, the producer’s attention increasingly reached beyond music. From 2019, public and political life occupied more of his thoughts. Having a voice became a question with another weight: how to keep it when the surrounding world provoked growing disagreement. That change belongs to the time in which the album was completed, but it does not turn every composition into a direct explanation.

Some compositions were already reaching listeners through Linda B and Floyd the Barber while the album was still being assembled. Preedlock later found a particular response among old-school listeners, while Hold On connected with fans of contemporary broken-beat music. Parallax Breakz praised the album’s emotional and sonic maximalism, while wishing certain tracks did not end so soon. Even that reservation contains a desire to stay longer.

Such responses had personal weight for All Out. The determination to improve had long carried both a stubborn wish to prove something and a simple need for support. When a listener wrote after the release that Preedlock was a daily listen, years of work acquired a concrete continuation: the music had become part of someone’s everyday life.

The story of Motor Cortex Stimulation follows that path, from an internal argument to a meeting with another person. Accumulated pressure finally travels beyond the studio. Somewhere on the other side, someone presses repeat.