DOWNLOAD: Boddika - Warehouse

Hotflush are giving away a track taken from their forthcoming Back & 4th compilation; a 20 track, 2CD compilation of old and new material, chronicalling the rise of the label on one CD whilst looking to the future with the other. Back & 4th includes exclusive tracks by people like Sepalcure, FaltyDL, Boxcutter, Sigha, Roska and more and its released on 4th April.

The track in question is by Boddika, and its called 'Warehouse.' Boddika of course is the solo alias of Al Bleek, one half of the Instra:mental duo, co-owner of Non Plus+ and one of the most prominent producers over the first few months of 2011. Hitting a raw electro style square on the head the Boddika releases on [nakedlunch] and Swamp 81 are hard, and consistently playable, a trait they share with this track.

DOWNLOAD: Boddika - Warehouse

RECOMMENDED: Kassem Mosse - Workshop 12 [Workshop]

A series of destructively brilliant 12”s have swiftly shifted Kassem Mosse’s profile from little-known purveyor of slo-mo, deconstructionist techno to something of a spearhead for a particular strain of house music. Along with his contemporaries and friends on the Workshop label (particularly Lowtec and Even Tuell), as well as UK devotees like Kowton, Instra:mental and Joy Orbison, his is a slowed-down, sub-heavy and druggy sound. Its overall effect is intoxicating in the extreme, insistent analogue grooves transposed into odd new dimensions and sounding liable to crumble at any second. With its obsession with bass, space and swing, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his music’s been picked up and widely adored by large swathes of the UK’s bass scene.

Mosse’s music is one of stasis, of single moments looped and stretched out into infinity, of single grooves allowed to run their course until they simply fall away. That was immediately evident on his earlier Workshop releases - the stuttering electro of Workshop 03’s A-side is a particularly potent example – as well as the build-release churn of the subtly anthemic ‘578’ (the Omar-S remix of which was the highlight of last year’s Freerotation festival). It’s even more explosively apparent in his sprawling live sets, which send minds into an even more extreme version of his recorded output’s fucked tunnelvision.

But if his recent 12” on Kinda Soul was Mosse at his warmest and most welcoming, its finest moment ‘Thalassocalyce’ emitting the same vaguely dystopian glow as Autechre’s Amber, this new Workshop release finds him at his most forbidding. Its tracks operate at faster pace than his usual narcoleptic, smacked-out tempo, but appear locked into even darker moods than usual. The untitled A-side sets up the same sort of infinity loop, but this time with a short and stammering vocal sample which hangs in space above his familiar, albeit peculiarly muted, bass gurgle. The main B-side’s rattling drum syncopations and uneasy, sinister drone constitute an inversion of deep house stereotypes - music of alienation and separation, despite its distinctly human warmth. It’s just as effortlessly beautiful though, and its soft pulses of melody imply something else again, tiny flickers of hope in a sea of darkness.

It’s Mosse’s finest contribution to the unerringly on-point Workshop label so far, and sits neatly alongside his best work. And as ever, excitingly, with another release for Nonplus in the pipeline, it feels like just the tip of a mighty, mighty iceberg.

Words: Rory Gibb // Out: Now

RECOMMENDED: Instra:mental – Zones [Semantica]

2010 was one hell of a year for London duo Instra:mental. Alongside spearheading the Autonomic sound’s drastic, frequently stunning reinvention of drum ‘n’ bass, alongside labelmate/collaborator dBridge and the likes of ASC and Consequence, their output away from 170bpm continued to broaden into slo-mo house, synth-driven electro and minimalist dubstep forms. To be fair, on initial inspection that might seem par for the course in the current bass landscape: if there’s been one overarching trend during the last couple of years, it’s been the distinct absence of the strict limitations dubstep once imposed on its producers. But very few have managed the transition between styles with such flair.

I suspect it’s in part due to the shapeshifting nature of the Autonomic sound they developed. Much like the process that transformed UK garage into early dubstep, it’s predominantly characterised by peeling away extraneous layers, leaving progressively fewer elements to work alongside one another: literally stripping dance music down to it’s barest essentials. Fused with the hefty Detroit techno influence at play in ‘Watching You’ and the Drexciyan depth charge of ‘Futurist’, in 2010 that spacious template spawned house so deep it was practically subaquatic (‘Let’s Talk’), acidic electro (‘Voyeur’ and Boddika’s ‘Boddika’s House’) and an expansive Fabriclive drum ‘n bass mix. In sheer breadth of vision, it’s pretty safe to say that Instra:mental embody a certain mongrel state of health in UK bass – one that finds kindred deconstructionist spirits all the way from Swamp81’s juke-tinged 808 workouts to Peverelist’s rolling, junglist grooves, via widescreen innovations from the likes of Kowton, Hessle Audio, Ostgut Ton and Kassem Mosse.

The duo’s latest release Zones (strictly their final 12” of last year) is a seriously limited preview of two tracks from this spring’s full-length album. And if this pair are anything to go by it’s a pretty unique proposition; advance reports have already confirmed a move away from drum ‘n’ bass tempo to a varied region between 100 and 140 bpm, and Boddika’s upcoming Swamp81 release is pure synthetic electro. Both ‘Love Arp’ and ‘Sun Rec’ slot neatly alongside, and offer a tantalising taste of what’s to come in April. ‘Sun Rec’s fusion of shattered percussion and pure eighties synthesis seems tailor made to attract adjectives like ‘lush’ and ‘sumptuous’. It’s a slow and considered trip through arpeggios that drift and cascade like the spray around a waterfall, discovering a groove that’s perhaps a little too unstable for easy dancing but which through a good system transforms into a beast both hulking and deceptively sensitive.

‘Love Arp’ is even better. Occupying a similar retrofuturistic space as much of Instra:mental’s recent output, it’s reminiscent of nothing so much as a vision of 2011 as imagined by the population of the late seventies: gaudy and polished to a high sheen, but with the tiniest hint of grit running beneath the surface. It’s neither entirely fatalistic (like the terrifying police-run London of ‘No Future’) nor wholly utopian (‘Watching You’s paean to finally requited digital love), but sits somewhere comfortably in between. In the end, it’s not so far off what the real 2011 might sound like, were it that easy to simply package a year into four minutes of music.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now (limited to 300 vinyl copies. No digital)

Link:
www.myspace.com/instramentaluk

RECOMMENDED: Actress - Paint, Straw & Bubbles/Maze [Honest Jon’s] & Machine & Voice EP [Nonplus+]

In advance of his eagerly awaited (from these quarters at least) second album Splazsh, Werk boss and enigmatic beat-chemist Darren Cunningham has just released a pair of beguiling 12”s under his Actress moniker. You can recognise an Actress track from a mile off - even though his more recent material displays a greater willingness to experiment than his magical Hazyville album - Cunningham’s music is defined by an instantly familiar sense of place. Tracks like ‘I Can’t Forgive You’ and sub-heavy house workout ‘Crushed’ exude a peculiar phosphorescent glow, their intensity heightened by an almost unbearable claustrophobia that presses inward as though the walls themselves are drawing nearer.

Similarly, both of the tracks on his first release for Honest Jon’s wrap themselves tightly around the listener while hinting at wide-open spaces just beyond the music’s confines. It’s a delicate balancing act – ‘Paint, Straw and Bubbles’ is almost impenetrably austere, its hypnotic spiral patterns so abstract that listening feels more like a feat of voyeuristic pleasure than one of physical connection. This distance only serves to enhance its atmosphere of deep-seated unease. ‘Maze (Long Version)’ on the flip offers more immediate gains, as thick bass frequencies and sparse electronic percussion generate a beautifully languid piece of stoned techno that seems far shorter than its six-minute runtime.

While the ‘Paint, Straw and Bubbles’ 12” offers curiously timeless artefacts, his plate for Instra:mental’s Nonplus+ label betrays its dance music lineage far more directly. ‘Machine & Voice’ does exactly what it says on the tin, playing an industrially rigid drum machine beat off against chopped ‘n’ sliced vocals. About halfway through, a woozy drift of melody, ripped straight from Flying Lotus’ ‘Parisian Goldfish’ school of sleaze, punctures the track’s heart for an all too brief few seconds before submerging again. ‘Loomin’ ratchets up the tension further, drowning a skeletal beat in waves of found sound and police sirens fading into the distance, and ‘Und U Boat’ is simply sublime, its lethargic hip-hop pace offset by the kind of aquatic melody that Highpoint Lowlife’s 10-20 has been making his own as of late.

What remains so intriguing about Actress’ music, despite its occasionally impenetrable exterior, is its constant sense of exploration. Just as he completely deconstructed Joy Orbison’s peak-time wonder ‘The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow’ to leave only its trace elements behind, he displays a defiantly unconventional bent on this collection of new tracks. Never staying still for a moment, and as in thrall to the cool mechanical motion of Throbbing Gristle and This Heat as to the UK dance music he is usually associated with, Cunningham remains an artist happy to work outside any confining notions of genre or scene. If these are anything to go by, Splazsh should be fascinating, unsettling and chilling in equal measure.

Words: Rory Gibb
Out: Now & Now

Link:
www.myspace.com/actresskhz