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His second EP for this excellent Finnish label.
‘Four tracks of arctic tropicalia constructed during last summer’s heatwave. Badly behaving analogue synths and echos were layered with noisy field recordings and improvised percussion instruments. Some dub was also thrown in. When temperatures finally started dropping, files were sent to Scape Mastering.’
Ghost Phone is back! Blowing in from Bristol with another hand of anonymous aces. Glossy R&B in flagranti and off its tits in a dank, heaving basement session.
The opener Hologram is characteristically greened-out: a 160bpm g-funk odyssey for the autonomic massive. Then it’s back to earth with Want U, a nectar-sweet, stripped-back dancefloor heater, complete with tongue in cheek nods to the Jersey Club sound.
Tough, loose jungle breaks revitalise a 90s classic on the flip, in So Gone; before Darkness Finds Home With U wraps things up with dense, heady atmospherics and ethereal vocals.
Another irresistible instalment of reanimations.
Brandy Tool is ambient but hypnotic; Miss You Anymore patches angelic, stone-cold-classic RnB straight through to the G-Phone; Babylon is melancholic, slo-mo grime; the stripped Girls Need Love Too is equal parts sweet and spooky.
A fourth quartet of masked mongrels. First up, a slo-mo heart-melter, spiked with scraps of misty-eyed soul; then Soul Seeker keeps things rolling with swinging 2-step drums and bittersweet vocal snippets. On the flip, the outer limits of the LA beats sound get nasty with foundation dubstep — a mid-tempo slugger from another planet, on a mission to scrunch rude boy’s bass-cones into the dust — before U & I draws the EP to a close, in an anthemic haze of vapour-wave synths and skeletal percussion.
RnB from Bristol, freaked, chopped ‘n’ screwed, but with its sensuality and slickness intact, for maximum dancefloor worries.
Four anonymous, strongly individual commissions from around the world: A1 is dubwise; Hit It Tool runs bumping 2step drums into Bmore breaks; B1 floats pitched-up vocal samples and misty-eyed rave chords, up and away; 2ON calls time with a wan club shuffle.
Four more contagiously skewed re-rubs from the mysterious maestros.
Mais Que Amor is a failsafe dancefloor re-animator, slinkily teasing out a screwed trap intro dotted with pitched vocals. Next level Next. Ride With Me is wild and bruk, with dirty south samples. Ize Kashmir keep things rolling for the heads-down crew on the flip, with its dank, bare-bones dub to close.
Demdike Stare and Andy Votel.
A bobbing, minimal groover from the Berlin corner, dug-in and funked-up over ten minutes; and icily original, top-dog work from Pev, tethered between a kind of arrested Highlife and a Detroit breakout.
Based on recordings by John Abercrombie, Miroslav Vitous, Louis Sclavis, Bennie Maupin, Paul Motian, Arvo Part and co.
‘Developing a sound-world of drifting, otherworldly atmospheres and strange fusion, these Villalobos-Loderbauer collaborations evade easy categorisation, even compared to the former’s genre-twisting solo offerings. The Clouds Know pulls at their backbone, refining a deft and subtle musical noir built on ambient cues, sparks and claps of electricity, brushed drums, black voids and subterranean bass swoops. Erratic, submerged rhythms make way for expansive fields of crisp, uncanny detail; enchanting, humid environments, dense with the chatter of synthesised insects, the gentle rain of drums, whispering cymbals… There’s a twinkle in the eye and moments of deadpan levity, but the overall mood here is sober and introspective.’