Thanks to illness and mid-year list plannings, this edition of Hyperspecific arrives late, so the premise is simple. A bumper collection of reviews, charting some great dance music that’s been released over the last six weeks or so, and a few still to come. All of these are worth your attention.
Bandshell – HES021
(Hessle Audio)
The same mix of playfulness and intrigue extends to the track titles on display here, which combine evocative imagery with a determined streak of the mundane. Appropriately, the most directly keyed in to UK club trends is ‘Rise ‘Em’, whose title is presumably a phonetic nod to ‘rhizome’, a term appropriated from plant biology by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and which has wriggled its way into the critical lexicon surrounding dance music subcultures. Its four minutes of off-kilter techno prowl in a similar way to recent music by Perc and Kowton, though it sounds like it’s evolved under a removed set of conditions from its closest cousins. It’s hard to imagine many of these tracks getting much play on a dancefloor – ‘Dust March’ is as forbidding and desert-dry as its title suggests – but given their tangential genesis that seems scarcely the point. The trio who run the Hessle Audio label seem to have sensed that they can now use the leverage they’ve gained through hard work, excellent DJing and clever curation, in order to showcase music that would normally never find its way anywhere near most club DJs’ bags.
Champion – Crystal Meth
(Butterz)
Kowton – Des Bisous
(Pale Fire)
Alex Coulton – Bounce EP
(Dnuos Ytivil)
The B-side of Kowton’s latest 12", a version of the A-side simply titled ‘Dub Bisous’, offers a glimpse of how exciting the results can be. Like the original, whose grimey strings and sub-low wallop suggest an unholy matrimony of Loefah and Levon Vincent, it’s raw to the point of raising blisters on speaker cones, but there’s something still more elemental here. Where the original is evocative of urban territory, this conjures up a landscape flattened from horizon to horizon. Turned up loud, the bass is indistinct, the threatening promise of a thunderstorm sitting heavy in the near distance; the strings stretch out to near infinity, leaching into all sections of the mix. It’s the most spectacular track Kowton’s yet put his name to. Translated into English its title reads ‘Dub Kisses’, which seems somehow fitting.
Ruff Draft – ‘Lone Ranger’ / ‘The Shining’
(Ruff Draft)
Joey Anderson – ‘3200 BC House Dancer’/’Join Her’
(Until My Heart Stops)
Various Artists – Earth Tones 3
(Soul People)
In keeping with the spirit of the festival, which has strong connections with the NY crew, Freerotation residents Leif and Joe Ellis have minted their new label with a pair of cuts from Anderson that plumb the depths: ‘Join Her’ is a slowly unraveling vortex of a track, opening with just the muffled throb of a kickdrum before splaying outwards into a spluttering mesh of percussion and lazy chords. It doesn’t go anywhere fast, and nor does its wonderfully titled A-side ‘3200 BC House Dancer’, where a fiendishly catchy three note bassline and chattery woodblocks lead into threadbare melodies so lovely and feather-light it’s a wonder they aren’t scattered to the wind. On the latest volume of Soul People’s Earth Tones series, Anderson’s ‘Track 3’ does something markedly different – a slow and sensuous grind whose oppressive dub techno chords scream ‘3am’. The three tracks from other producers on the EP are nearly as good, though Black Jazz Consortium comes a close second with the characteristically languid ‘Hypnothesis’.
The Sun God – Being Hieroglyphic
(Bio Rhythm)
With rhythms locked in place to the point that you could actually envisage mixing them (often a challenge, thanks to the free-flowing logic of many Moss tracks), Being Hieroglyphic frequently recalls the crisp and shimmering techno soul of early Detroit practitioners like Juan Atkins and Eddie Fowlkes. It’s easy to imagine Moss hunched over a desk full of equipment, allowing these jams to play out with subtle modulation for hours, before sluicing out eight-minute long segments of each for release. That sense of free improvisation, of allowing the track itself to dictate Moss’ path through it, is what ties him very directly to Sun Ra, a huge influence and his namesake for this project. The title track in particular is spectacular, led throughout by a thin, ping-ponging melody that, comet-like, acquires interplanetary detritus as it goes.
A Made Up Sound – Malfunctions
(50 Weapons)
A Made Up Sound – Archive II
(Clone Basement Series)
Metasplice – Topographical Interference EP
(Morphine)
The skeletal techno of Metasplice’s Topographical Interference EP is the latest. The first thing you notice is its brilliant titles – things like ‘Bohrium Slunk’ and ‘Thermite Jack’, which suggest that these tracks are raw earth materials brought up from underground for closer examination. Indeed, they sound like freshly mined ore, their techno content yet to be fully extracted. The beats are present but they’re impure and unrefined – surfaces are left abrasive, frequencies from across the spectrum bleed into one another, definition between individual elements is often hard to detect. There’s always a risk with these kind of textures – scuzzy, assembled with analogue gear, alive with sci-fi radiophonics – that the music they drive ends up feeling rather anachronistic, a living fossil dug up from a past age. Like past Morphine releases, Metasplice avoid that trap thanks to their music’s heavily psychedelic component: a little like label boss Morphosis’ recent TEPCO Report 12", final track ‘Laminate Resonan’ restrains its aggression, doling it out in portions small enough so as not to obscure its overall drugged, hypnotic swagger.
