RECOMMENDED: Egyptrixx – Bible Eyes [Night Slugs]

Going a long way to justify the hype, Night Slugs had dancefloor anthems coming out of their ears last year. From an outsider’s perspective it was more than pretty impressive to consider that all these tunes - Girl Unit’s ‘IRL’ and ‘Whut,’ Mosca’s sprawling epic ‘Nike’ and ‘Square One,’ Jam City’s ‘Ecstacy Refix’ and Velour’s ‘Booty Slammer’ – stemmed from the same label. Refining that output they’re kicking off a new year with their first artist album - which follows fresh in the wake of their endlessly impressive Allstars Volume 1 compilation released late last year – produced by the most stylistically consistent artist to grace the label to date, Egyptrixx.

The Toronto native picks up where his The Only Way Up EP left off; his sound spreading itself thicker across the full length sized canvas. Having dabbled a lot with noise in various forms - playing in bands as well as being a classically trained pianist – all his experience seems to feed into his current manoeuvres within dance music. You can hear that noisy dissonance in the oozing syths but it’s paired with bright, slow burning melodies and it all manages to come together into one flowing cohesive structure. It’s a subtle, more melancholy vision that he presents across this album, opting for his own manner of depth rather than the outbursts of joy personified by other, more anthemic Night Slugs releases.

Finding a sonic cousin in Ikonika’s debut album, Contact Want Love Have, released on Hyperdub last year – they both share a hyper colour sense of fun and melody - Bible Eyes is a woozy exploration of sound. There are plenty of highlights: ‘Start From The Begining’, ‘Liberation Front’ and ‘Fuji Club’ all show off different facets of Egyptrixx’s sound; the opener is all seasick piano and spaced out percussion and brooding synth-scapes that wouldn’t feel to out of place alongside Oneohtrix Point Never or Knox-Om-Pax. One of the more dance floor leaning tracks ‘Liberation Front’ twists itself into more extreme shapes, while ‘Club Fuji’ is a hard hitting, sub-loaded but spaced out grime-like effort.

There’s a big lean toward the bastardized house direction on this album; the listener is often fed relentless 4x4 kicks broken up with rhythmic ticks and spaced out excursions into slow-mo colourful dubstep. And for the most part Bible Eyes gives off the air of a house album, or a more twisted take on one at least, but at times there’s almost a trance-like quality at work here too, like he decided to chop and screw stadium filling synths from Tiesto, transplanting them into underground 2011.

Competently displaying that both Night Slugs and Egyptrixx can step into the album format with ease – something that I wasn’t sure would be such a smooth transition – Bible Eyes is a fine album that wont bang you over the head with wall to wall bangers. It’ll ease you into a heat wave soaked colourful dimension that’s surprisingly comfortable. Deep and hypnotic without ever retreating up its own bass funnel, there’s still plenty of Night Slug’s trademark bite, it’s just presented across a very stringent sound palette by one of their most talented artists.

Words: James Balf
Out: Now

Links:
www.myspace.com/africaforyou
http://nightslugs.net

RECOMMENDED: Jam City – Night Slugs White Label [White]

It’s easy to end up with a spot of tunnel vision when you’re locked to the constant shifting of sounds and styles going on in a scene, so when I say Jam City’s anthemic refix of Endgames’ ‘Ecstasy’ is hotly anticipated, it’s hard to really gauge whether that excitement spreads beyond the borders of the usual Night Slugs/UK bass followers. Still, it ought to – while the track’s been doing the rounds on dubplate for what feels like an age now, it’s just as good as it was when it first started appearing in mixes from Bok Bok, Greena and the rest of the London crew.

The first thing that strikes when needle hits wax is just how stripped-back and lo-fi Jam City’s production sounds. It was initially tempting to write off its canned feel as a product of the low bitrate mixes it appeared in, but placed alongside the highly buffed sheen of everything else coming out at the moment, ‘Ecstasy Refix’ stands out as a maverick and entirely successful experiment. It helps that its percussion is perfectly pitched - 808 hits rattle around the mix, seemingly in a hundred different places at once. Played off against the hypnotic repetition of its maddeningly catchy central motif the overall effect is one of stasis, of having to run flat out just to stay in the same place. If that sounds like strange praise, it’s probably not quite doing justice to the jittery, adrenal feel of the whole thing, or its compulsively twitchy charm.

On the flipside, JC offers another pair of reimaginings: a venomous house refix of DJ Deeon’s ‘Let Me Bang’, replete with an insistent drum hook – clearly an emerging trademark – and an odd but very interesting Wiley-styled ‘Devil Mix’ of DJ Bone’s ‘Shut The Lights Off’. Considering the unrelenting nature of Bone’s own productions, its spaced out eski-stylings come as a surprise, but a welcome one. Once again it relies on a central hook around which to hang incremental change – in this case an abrasive, grinding sub – and burns itself out over four airy minutes, and rounds out a 12" that may well be the best Night Slugs have yet put out there. It's certainly their finest white label so far, and to be honest if you haven't managed to snag a copy by now it might well already be too late. Still, it's well worth the effort to track down.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now

Link:
www.myspace.com/jamcitytrax