A cohesive collaboration of two Irish and Scottish artists is lush with atmospheric house shimmer and deceptively chilled out eddies of mutating sound static-charged with serpentine breaks.
Bright bell tones counterbalanced with low frequency washes of dark blue synth, a rush of DnB quickly picking up speed. This is exactly the track you want to hear at 6 AM as you look up to see a new day already in the sky. Joyous house chords break through the mist and a subdued kick takes over. Though this track is a great closer, it kicks off this recent collaboration with Artemon and DJ JAVASCRIPT.
The slow, almost sensuous break design that Artemon comes up with are the perfect backbone for the contemplative whorls of sound that slowly rise and fall in urgency as the tracks progress. The tones are warm and inquisitive. A bassline that buzzes like a lightsaber dances around the cutting, groovy drum patterns on “Moving Shadows.” There is also a peculiar spoken interlude about a police crackdown on a DIY house party, it sounds like a real ode to deep, pulsing house music.
“Sounds of Anxiety” sounds exactly like the disorienting, stricken paralysis of the onset of extreme panic. Almost-overheard voices distorted beyond any hope of recognition, a party on the other side of a wall. Swells of distorted noise that almost but don’t quite resolve into anything that sounds like a scale; any handhold in the barely restrained chaos of cerebral noise.
The Javascript side of the disc definitely sounds like a natural progression of the kind of auditory framework or landscape Artemon has established, as snappier snares and sharper, more insistent hats negotiate a groove that somehow masks bristling late-night energy with a wintergreen, blissed out vibe. “A96” has the cinematic quality of a kind of resolve in the face of imminent danger, apt music for a protagonist wrestling with a potentially catastrophic fate. The percussion hits selectively, but effectively, in tough and declaratory bursts.
The next track “Creed” is victorious and unflinchingly hopeful: a release of the formerly established narrative tension. The skittering pattern of hats are almost like a particularly musically sophisticated marching-band fight song. The Sentinel Mix of his track Fauna is contemplative and fizzy with distortion, undisturbed by rhythm. Billows of notes pour out as weightlessly as an echo. The final two tracks are collaborations between the two. In the first, a drum pattern balances, unstable, on top of an already teetering plinth of synth notes struggling under the gravity of pitch. It almost seems to reverse direction as the patterns of toms and rim hits interweave. The closing track “Untitled Trance Anthem,” is fittingly the high energy point, with a galloping kick drum. Strobes of trance stabs flicker overtop a merely intimated vocal sample, a hustling and housey call to action.
-Winston Mann
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