Hysterics - Hysterics

Label: Night Slugs

By this point, Girl Unit is probably the only core member of the Night Slugs crew who hasn’t fallen out of our favour at one point or another. Having already donned the Hysterics moniker for a Club Constructions EP and a few mixes, his return brings a set of taut, stylish club tracks with proven dancefloor mileage. There’s a distinct scifi aesthetic in place here. Club Life plays like space-age vogue, all jittery filtered synths, humming machinery and slick rewinds. Eye Mask’s sharply looped melodies sound like The Field if he really went for it in the club, its colour and intensity played out in staccato intervals.

Yet the most exciting tracks here are the even numbers. HTRX9 is a beast for the dancefloor, its melodies fired like lasers, while Empty is an unexpectedly soulful closer, dominated by gentle Rhodes chords, the typically twitchy Night Slugs percussion only occasionally rearing its head. In terms of club muscle and class, this is the best NS transmission we’ve had for a while. 

7/10

Hodge - HEK025

Label: Hemlock

Bristol’s Hodge seems to just get better with each release. He’s already proven his diversity, deftly moving between the colourful house of Outboxx, techno meditations with Pev and his own explorations which dig into the UK bass spectrum outside the 4/4. His latest for Untold’s Hemlock imprint has a real rude flavour to it, immediately apparent on the grime-soaked strings of Blood Moon, whose constant rhythmic pressure is all swagger, indicating that Hodge may have a learnt a little from working with Pev, maestro of such knotty percussion.

I Don’t Recognise You Lately is just as fine, a bright UK Funky melody isolated from its familiar surroundings, left to play out alone in a field of chittering snares and aggressive tides of bass pressure. Recall lays out a simple synth bounce before assaulting it with an array of effects and clattering drums, while Tail Of The Snake goes tropical with buoyant chimes, animal cries and a real Afro shake to the rhythms. One of the great things about Hodge’s music is that, unlike some of his contemporaries pushing the vanguard of UK’s mutant techno scene, he’s not afraid of melodies and hooks. This makes his tracks as easy to love as they are destructive on the dancefloor. Even better, it seems with each successive EP he tries on a new style, and every outfit just fits him so damn good.

8/10

Cassius Select - Crook

Label: Unknown To The Unknown

DJ Haus’ stable of warped, rugged dance music UTTU has a steady hit rate, but they’ve put out so much material recently that it’s been hard to keep track. What is undeniable is the main man’s ability to pick out new talent, here confirmed with the arrival of the impressive Crook EP from Cassius Select, a producer with only a smattering of releases to his name (including a tight split EP with Tuff Sherm).

While UTTU’s early concern with bassline business has given way to a more house-centric approach, the label has never totally departed from the UK bass spectrum, and Crook casts a fresh glance at bass' hardcore origins. Cassius Select references UK dance history in style and mood more than sound – pirate radio and bleary car park raves are welded to this music’s DNA.

Crook doesn’t mess about. All the tracks are under four minutes, their sampled drums and vocals cut up and brutalised largely beyond recognition. This music is inherently mangled, which makes its jagged grooves all the more delicious. Cross Strut starts as a mission statement, a sugary vocal setting the scene before the carpet is pulled out from under us, as the track abruptly gives way to a storming kick and razor snares, a juggled one-two punch vocal deadpanning ‘suck me’ and ‘you suck now' with tongue firmly in cheek.

These tunes sound like they’re crafted from asorted sonic detritus but they don’t skimp on the muscle, while melody is used sparingly but effectively. CROOK is a dark roller, shattering kicks and canned rhythms loosely adorned by clipped vox and brief flashes of filtered synthwork. On the flip Joy Mile’s insistent bass resonance harks openly back to early dubstep, but its still unashamedly weird, its angular rhythms lit only by an incongruous crystalline bell.

Final cut He Ain’t Worth is even more menacing, its paranoid urban opening referencing Grime’s new wave but its surgical beatwork is all jungle sans breaks. The drums roil under a tornado of chopped vocals, a work of collage which is particularly impressive when one considers the artistic process, arranging these tiny sonic clips into an arrangement that coheres with such explosive energy. The Crook EP takes no prisoners, and it’s all the better for it. This music is rough, inventive, and black as pitch.

8/10

January Roundup 2014

The writing may have stopped but the listening never did - we at WN have been using our time off to explore the dusty recesses of hardcore and disco, but we've still just about managed to keep up to date. Here are some of the Dec-Jan period's best tunes, with a couple of older numbers thrown in for good measure.

Tracklist:

Leon Vynehall - Inside The Deku Tree

D-Ribeiro - Down You Will Get

Moodymann - Lyk U Used 2 feat. Andrés

Deetroit - Catchin' That Groove

Big Ben Tribe - Tarzan Loves The Summer Nights

PhOtOmachine - Special Luv

Dance System - DS Theme

Innershades - A Night To Forget

Rødhåd - The Wall
Paul Mac - Grand Statement
Pearson Sound - Raindrops pt. II

Shackleton - Freezing Opening Thawing

Mssingno - Xe2
Miltiades - Stmete
Moomin - You Neva Know

Not on Youtube:

The latest in HNNY's unstoppable stream of kiss edits, Sneeze.

And then there's this ungooglable slice of heat from Rush Hour's No 'Label' imprint. Definitely worth a listen.

Until next time, enjoy the tunes.

Shackleton - Freezing Opening Thawing

Label: Woe To The Septic Heart

Media coverage of Sam Shackleton takes constant pains to establish the singularity of his sound: Shackleton’s sound is without parallel… Shackleton still treads no path but his own. The constant emphasis on his music’s unique sonic DNA would be trite if it weren’t so irrefutably true. Over his career, from Skull Disco to 2012’s experimental long player, Shackleton has crafted a sonic language unto himself, with its own internal matrix of reference points which he continues to hone and revise over each consecutive release. Dazzling exercises in polyrhythm are the constant, while his sound has slowly shifted in its approach to timbre and colour: a brighter, cleaner aesthetic marking The Drawbar Organ EPs and this, his first release since 2012. While his reference points remain largely the same – dub and traditional African motifs alloyed to dubstep-inflected rhythmic experimentation – Shackleton retains a restless musical spirit, constantly offering challenging work which demands – and deserves – a great deal of the listener’s time.

Some aspects of Freezing Opening Thawing will be familiar to Shackleton’s fans, yet a new focus on polished synthetic textures is striking. These tracks embrace the artificiality of their sounds, sketching a crystal-sharp, synthesised rainforest bound to beguile and transfix weary ears. The title track is a deceptively expansive journey, where shifting percussive textures are electrified by an array of icy, computer-music synthlines. While most producers focus on texture and emotional resonance in their melodies, leaving percussion as a mere rhythmic skeleton, Shackleton here reverses this process: the subtle timbres of his drums are a melody unto themselves, counterpointed by the inhuman polish of treated organ notes. Thus the pressure is built around the contrast between humid rhythmic acrobatics and the sterilised sheen of the topline, and the effect is magnificent.

Closer White Flower With Silver Eye continues the journey into artificial textures slightly reminiscent of the digital/human interference patterns of Oneohtrix Point Never’s recent R Plus Seven, as roboticised choirs penetrate a dense field of intricate melodic and percussive programming. Central track Silver Keys takes a slightly different approach: conjuring a space-age jungle then injecting it with the dread of Shackleton’s musical past, where the bass growls like an Aboriginal call to arms, a sound which exudes mist and myth. Shackleton has one of the most unerring hit-rates in the world of dance music, yet it’s a great credit to his care and artistry that each new release remains surprising as well as enthralling - even if you were already expecting it to be good. It may only be three tracks long, but Freezing Opening Thawing offers an uncommonly rich musical experience, its inimitable sounds sure to echo in the listener’s mind and muscles long after the third track draws to a close.

8.5/10

Read this review in context at Inverted Audio

Joe - Punters Step Out / Club Scared

Label: Hemlock

He may not be the most prolific producer, but few survivors of the UK’s dubstep scene can rival the unerring hit-rate of Joe. Inventive and perplexing, Joe’s tracks often hit way-out leftfield, and with his follow-up to last month’s Slope on Hessle the man doesn’t disappoint, offering some of the most warped, addictive dance cuts this side of A Made Up Sound. Punters Step Out is unhinged: a carnival ride on DMT, a club night melting into an acid trip, it’s anything but expected. A detuned funfair melody takes centre stage, winding sinuously around a stripped field of clicks. It may be unsettling but it’s undeniably danceable – after a brilliant moment where Joe jarringly uses music technology against itself (sampling the sound of an audio cable becoming half-unplugged), the beats become more muscular, lending that disquieting melody a new raucous energy. It’s a strange track, and certainly an acquired taste, but you’ve got to give it to Joe for making this all somehow work – one can easily imagine a room of clubbers equal parts confused and ecstatic.

After such a madcap opener one might expect something a little straighter, but instead Club Scared jumps right off the deep end. Here a rolling drum pattern provides a stark skeleton, more club-tooled than its predecessor. But it’s not the music here that aims to mess with your mind, it’s the vocal. Once the groove gets going, a prim British woman starts intoning mindfuck one-liners over the top – highlights including ‘this is the hook…this is the part of the song you pay attention to… stop listening … you’ve heard this before … isn’t this the same as everything else?’ Alongside the increasingly frantic synth notes Club Scared builds up a real lunatic energy, its self-reflexive lyrics perfectly balanced by its manic 140bpm drumride. They’re bold, they’re weird, and more than a little frightening, but Joe’s new tracks sound blisteringly fresh – and doesn’t all the best art alienate as many people as it thrills?

8.5/10