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

Untold - Doff / Phive

Label: Hemlock Black

It’s been almost a decade since dubstep lit up the UK scene, and in the intervening period we’ve had no comparable innovation, nothing as groundbreaking or as community-orientated. But dubstep didn’t make such a splash just because artists had come up with new ways to configure time signatures or plumb uncharted frequencies of sub bass. What set the scene alight was the sudden explosion of imagination and creativity in dance music, helmed by a crew of distinct, singular producers. These artists, such as Peverelist, Ramadanman, Shackleton, or Untold never stopped exploring, each release marked by a new colour, concept or playful invention. And it is telling that, though dubstep as we knew it is long gone, these producers remain, restlessly pushing boundaries and toying with sound. It is to them, rather than a 140bpm count or lashings of bass, that we owe much of the UK’s most exciting electronic music of the last decade.

Jack Dunning’s output as Untold is the work of a relentless shapeshifter. His early bass experiments swapped their colour for muscle and grit on the techno-focused Change In A Dynamic Environment series, before the inky Black Light Spiral LP crossed into increasingly unnerving, unhinged terrain. To inaugurate Hemlock’s Black sublabel we have Doff, two stripped techno compositions that show how Dunning’s work continues to mutate with unerring confidence. The title track pits hollow flurries of kicks against bass hits that sound like they’re being crushed out of existence. The militaristic tone, clean drums grafted onto distortions, is held in thrall to an unexpected guitar twang, isolated in the darkness and reverbed into oblivion. It’s cerebral yet brutalist, the abrupt halfway break leaving us disorientated by silence before those machine-gun kicks strike the listener right back into line.

B-side Phive is a more meditative cut, here the roles of melody and percussion inverted as the drums become a light rustling accompaniment to subtly interwoven guitar samples. There’s more of a sense of progression here too, an uneasy synth wash leading the latter half into uncharted scifi territory. These might not be particularly dancefloor friendly cuts, but their stark execution is challenging in the best way possible, midnight folk crossed with surgical techno experimentations. It’s bold and brutal, which is more or less exactly what we’ve come to expect from Untold.

7.5/10

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

Randomer – Scruff Box / Get Yourself Together

Label: Hemlock

Scruff Box

Get Yourself Together

London-based producer Randomer hasn’t been releasing for too long, but is very quickly establishing a sound for himself. Early releases on Hessle and Super showed a range of styles but it was in his recent Real Talk EP on Numbers that Randomer really hit his mark; displaying a rough-edged approach to House that aims big and hits hard. This double A-side release on Hemlock shows Randomer refining his style, kicking off with Scruff Box. This is Dance music taken to its roughest roots, it’s all about those heavy, skipping beats and a monstrous bass riff that tears into the fabric of the track. Abrupt vocal and synth samples penetrate the sound in a precise, mechanical fashion, leaving very little that could be called a human touch. The cold, harsh style of these beats may not be to everyone’s taste, lacking the tight construction of German Techno or the raw viscerality of someone like Objekt, but the track hits home, and looks set to dominate dancefloors.

B-side Get Yourself Together is perhaps a stronger cut because it stretches Randomer’s style all the way to the limit, discordant keys and static rips building to a massive first drop, where a huge elasticated bassline once more starts to rip into the sound. Although there’s a fair amount of sonic detail accompanying the showstopping noises, these tracks can feel a little too reliant on big features rather than a real sense of variation or construction, and occasionally bear a too-close similarity to Blawan's output, but that doesn’t take away from their value in the club. If you’re looking for something with a lot of depth and warmth it might be worth looking elsewhere, but both these tunes will hit home for DJ’s looking for a hard, mechanical sound as well as fans of Randomer’s previous release.

7/10