Three brilliant re-routings of Detroit machine funk — Moodymann in particular — into deep mid-Atlantic co-minglings with raw, old-school hiphop and house.
Str8 Crooked is clattering, chugging jack, holding something like Paisley soul under the water; Build Back Better Sweatshops is more driving, riven with breakdowns and horror-show vocal samples. With an uptempo downbeat which nonetheless sounds like a tolling bell, the epic, immersive, sixteen-minutes-plus Episcopi Vagantes pulls off the deadly combination of a kind of stifled, timeworn, melodic wistfulness and percussively restless, passing-through urgency.
This is killer dance music, run through with swingeing, parping bass and ruff b-boy drum-machine rhythms: encrusted and detailed, mangled and nervy, but intensely hard-grooving; wired with punk insouciance, edginess, and free spirit.
Bim bim bim.

Visceral, elemental, electronic funk, conjured from scraps of sound, breath, mutterings, dubwise remembrances, scuffling, sweat and blood, thin air — ‘crawled out of the slime’, as the opener puts it, self-engendering like the baddie in Terminator — all harnessed to cruelly grooving earthquake bass and b-boy drum science.
Rhythmically it has ants in its pants and it needs to dance, with an improvisatory, streetwise nervous energy and uninhibited, purposeful rapture — akin to this guy, say, eighteen minutes in — crossed with on-song Pepe Bradock and stripped-to-the-bone, mongrel hip-hop.
It’s unruly and edgy, a bit off its rocker, emotionally ranging — typically anxious, often nostalgic — and riveting dance music.
Judge-dread mastering by D&M; first-class Pallas pressing; stunning gatefold artwork by Will Bankhead.
Ruff ruff ruff.

‘The opener Cans People is an archaic rave monster, To Know Those Who is non-linear dub techno, Nocturnal Palates expands the filter-house universe, and Rave Nite Itz All Right hits you hard and strange, kind of subtly.
‘The last two tracks really let loose. Madteo manipulates time, space and sounds to create the psychedelic secrets of Luglio Ottantotto. And Emo G (Sticky Wicket) explores the outskirts not only of House or Techno or whatever but music in general: a fifteen-minute trip through the low frequencies, the rumble, the dark hearts, and the enchantment. Breathtaking.’