Pugilist smashes it again on Kenzo’s Artikal. He’s going to be one to watch if he keeps this up. ‘Raindance’ drops dessicated, concrete block beats and such hugely compressed bass weight you feel like you’re levitating a few inches off the floor on a magic carpet of low frequencies. No idea how the kid does it? but it’s special!
‘Murmur’ is the other standout for me, with a quirky stagger and lolloping swing to the groove; more slimey, rolling, more organic and wastelandish.
Sound System
Pugilist: Astral Plane
This is more like it. If you’re going to slavishly emulate and/or reference an all out Dub aesthetic you may as well come correct and get heavy with the business, rather than faff around with all this tasteful, fussy, calibration and twee restraint. Here we have the convincing, unforgiving smack, thud and pummel of a running-it-red, booming rig at peak witching hour, absolutely wiping the floor with the tepid likes of aforementioned Karma and other lightweight wannabes. I mean it’s not hard to do, if you set your dial to it, so better cut it professional with thick and oily ganja fug, and not fuck around, knowhaddmean?
To be honest I think this is a raw nerve within the Dubstep ‘community’. This blog has more tumbleweeds rolling through it than an abandoned desert western film set most of the time, ya get me? so when I posted some knocked off, rambling thoughts about Digidub v Dubstep last year, I was more than a little surprised to have more reads/visitors in a few hours/days than I get in a couple of months!? Go figure. I should re-write that piece properly and flesh out my argument coherently (if and when I can be bothered) because I was clearly on to something?
Klan 6IX: Elipse/Just Do It
More Hench wobble nastiness, keeping it unpretentiously thuggish ruggish and pitching for the gut. (Nothing on the interweb to post a preview/listen of? but) ‘Just Do It’ stands out in the filth stakes and pummels the b-line into a bloody hash of compressed, minced frequencies. Outstanding dance floor business.
Argo: Glowz
Foggy, ethereal trapstep minimalism from Paris on J Kenzo’s Artikal Music.
Huge, booming, murky bass tonnage that tokes hard and lines up the cross-hairs. Won’t make any sense at all unless played over real speakers or quality headphones.
Monsters of Doomcore
One of those accidental finds where I was simply attracted by the name of the label; ‘Monsters of Doomcore’ (yeeeah!) and had to investigate…
Although when I looked up TPROE on Discogs and saw that he’s already supposedly released 25 albums(!?!) in the last 16 years I had to laugh. It’s surely impossible, for multiple reasons, to take any artist who makes that claim seriously (unless they’re maybe The Fall or the Melvins…and even then…ya get me?) That discussion aside (and unfairly perhaps? having little or no interest in exploring his back-catalogue as a result) there are definitely a couple of stand out warehouse-sized crowd smashers here.
I don’t really want to know or speculate what “Densely Packed Hitlers” is about? (especially with the label press-release touting over-population and that a “great culling is coming”…) however, the production does have expertly crafted, massive, crushing low end, clearly built to level huge space arenas in a cold rush vibe.
Aquarian: Bad Feeling/Insulin
I’ve just done a whole bunch of new(ish) release reviews for the next issue of Datacide so I’ll try not to double up/copy, but this latest one by Aquarian deserves special mention.
His best and most slamming release to date and probably my favourite Bass release of the moment. Drenched in dark warehouse rave vibes, he’s definitely beefed up the low end and fine-tuned his chopped breaks & kicks aesthetic; strong tension and release composition too. In fact I would go so far as to say; no-one does it better! Proof that keeping it simple always leads back to something stronger.
‘Bad Feeling’ could almost be of D’Arcangelo/SNS/ADC/Anibaldi Italian broken beat techno vintage, just as ‘Insulin’ hints at a Mover vibe too!
This is a must for any fans of that era/sound.
Wevaman: Death Dealer Subfiltronik: Vortex
Hench tunes always make me feel tired and old (and I mean that in a good way). I find it strangely reassuring that there are young men out there wasting their youth on this thoroughly unpleasant, bleak sonic battering ramage. It takes a certain mettle of character to stay unwavering on this particular path and there’s scant reward at the end of the day, let’s face it. Certainly in technicality it’s far superior to the idolised non-entities of “craft” (the Jeff Mills, the Hawtins, and any other cretin variation thereof). So I find and hear hope in it.
‘Death Dealer’ is ultra tech, crisp, choppy stop-start, gnarled wobble business. Functional to the point of pitiless and everything tight and right in the mix. ‘Vortex’ is little more than an angry, mechanistic loop running on and on, filtering nastier as the track progresses. Again expert tech construction. There’s some respite in a sticky, false Trance nirvana halfway before it boshes back into the machine hell.
