After last month’s exercise in genre deep-delving, for this month’s Hyperspecific there’s something lighter on offer. Contained within is a selection of new music that’s been blasted with high voltage surges of electricity, either sending it wildly flailing to the floor or squashing it twitching to the spot (plus some other bits and pieces chucked in for good measure). Grab a handful of overhead power cable, jam it deep into the midrange, throw the switch and watch these creatures light up, spark and spit.
Kuedo – Live, Work & Sleep In Collapsing Space [Planet Mu]
Laurel Halo is here on remix duties. Coinciding nicely with her stunning Quarantine album, her remix appears to alight upon a single second of the original, and zoom right in to microscopic level. At this magnification, its textures are continually in flux, ruffling over one another, tumbling into the background and roiling around jagged string stabs. It’s more akin to Quarantine than it is any of her previous releases, in that it forsakes momentum for total immersion, all body-snagging textures that reach outward to beckon unwary souls deeper.
Swindle – Do The Jazz EP [Deep Medi Musik]
Swindle & Silkie – Unlimited/Pineapple [Butterz]
Logos – Kowloon EP [Keysound]
The EP’s other two tracks are more attuned to dancefloor momentum – just about – though the drum machine tics and stammered voices of ‘Error 808’ are still liable to jar the unwary. They rattle in a way that seeps Chicago house and footwork into what’s otherwise a thoroughly London sound, and sit alongside Pearson Sound’s recent music as some of the most successful examples of cross-Atlantic hybridisation emerging from the UK scene at the moment.
Despite their varying levels of ambivalence towards clubbers, all four tracks on Kowloon share a sumptuous depth and richness. ‘Atlantis 96’s stacked layers stitch together a frosty and freakily fragile patchwork quilt of synth texture. Between these defined melodies, chimes and percussive boinks are ghost presences, confined forever to the edges of perception. They leave a sad and metallic taste in the mouth, in the best possible way.
Slackk – Raw Missions [Local Action]
Aybee – Astral Metronome EP [Deepblak]
On B-side ‘Kommands’, he occasionally destabilises the groove by throwing a couple of bars into total disarray, sending the track tumbling into a heap before it picks itself up, near imperceptibly, dusts itself off and carries on as before. Towards the end, as its earlier instability suggested, it begins to unravel entirely, and is swallowed up by a rising mass of swampy fluid. The Astral Metronome EP highlights the sensory parallels between being underwater and being so monumentally stoned that even the sound around you seems to stretch and distort. With its skunked out kitchen-sink rhythm and indistinct vapour trails, lead track ‘No Fiction’ is cemented to its chair, doomed to forever wander the inside of its own skull, only smacked out of its reverie by handclaps that hit with phenomenal force.
Heatsick – Deviation [PAN]
So ‘C’etait un rendez-vous’ swings and slinks its way through summer night streets, equal parts corny jazz-funk elevator Muzak and Pet Shop Boys, featuring (presumably) Warwick narrating in sing-speak the title’s naughty escapades. The title track and ‘The Stars Down To Earth’ are Mathematics-style no-fi house/boogie, ablaze with grubby neon striplight – the latter is a woozy delight, sensually layering jazz keys onto a stiffly syncopated dancehall rhythm. It’s reworked seamlessly into kwaito-fried closer ‘No Fixed Address’, which whines like a vuvuzela; the closest thing you’re likely to hear to a Heatsick Dancefloor Banger. Both find Warwick at his most playful, but like the rest of its music they radiate hints of melancholy, toying with dissonance and isolating each character firmly in its own place. It might be a summer night in Heatsick’s world, but the humidity and pollution is still thick enough to press in upon the senses.
October & Borai – Palmorosa/I Didn’t Mean To [Apple Pips]
B-side ‘Palmarosa’ is a case in point. It’s been nearly two years since it opened his depth-charge of a set at Freerotation 2010, but its ominous busted saxophone blurts haven’t lost any of their frostily anthemic edge. Nor has its tantalisingly slow ascent from near-silence, its gravitational pull gathering additional sonic detritus like some softly pulsing celestial anomaly, ratcheting up the tension to fever pitch. Halfway through it draws backward and wraps in upon itself, the prelude to the inevitable rush outward, which grips somewhere near the small of the back before violently dragging you forward into the swirling heart of the maelstrom. ‘I Didn’t Mean To’ is beatific by comparison: its silk-soft pads and the chatter of birdsong in the distance are the deceptive calm right in the eye of the storm.
