Blawan came out the blocks hard with his first release on Hessle Audio, stripped back, tough and uber percussive - just the way we like it. Hard tribal beats got chopped and flipped into rolling grime-like approximations of garage and dubstep via a rolling techno sensibility that hits in the perfect place between dance floor headiness and propulsive head nodding energy that verges on the meditative if you weren’t so busy catching yourself on those rhythms. His second release, featured on the A-Side, comes on Folk Wood with Ste Shine, whose deeper vision balances out the 12” nicely.
The lazer guided synths blips on Blawan’s ‘Jackel Ter9’s’ ride the rolling grooves like a twisted sibling of grime’s past with smeared synth textures taking over adding a twisted energy that really bursts out the speakers. Shades of Kode9’s ‘Black Sun’ can be heard in the down tuned synth squiggles, but its taken into a different placem plus the rhythmic patterns echo the tough tribalism of his first release, a hybrid sound that does that more dubstep inherent thing of balancing space and time to create dance floor tension that oozes pent up energy.
Ste Shine drops an altogether deeper and more spaced out track in ‘Mid-life Crisis,’ one that harnesses melodic synth patterns and the original dubstep vibe that gets twisted into a tense almost sinogrime shape that gets crossed with an early Warp era energy; drum hits get tweaked and dubbed into orbit, bass pulses hit the chest and the synths get seriously hypnotic with their melodies.
Words: James Balf
Out: Now
Links:
www.myspace.com/blawan
www.myspace.com/steshine
www.myspace.com/folkwood
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