Takes the clubbier, heavier elements on Classical Curves and airs them out, jackhammering Jersey club kicks and machine noise transported into lighter, more organic territory. Sounds like a smoke break outside the club, the thumps of the dancefloor bleeding out of the steel and glass and rattling the planter you're leaning on. 500 Years is one of his best moments - love the rhythms of muffled noise following those chirps of synth. Worst Illusion and Garlands lure you in with hints of melody ... read more

90 for the original version w/ Origin Unknown remix (bizarre to hear the latter with good sound quality). Every jump-up producer has been trying and failing to recreate that bassline for 18 years and counting. 85 for the version I downloaded because if you can distinguish the remixes (aside from the OU one and the B2B one, which is just dopey and underwhelming) from one another you have better ears than I do.

2016: Listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Swans, Aphex Twin, highly acclaimed music (mostly rock and IDM) that reflected and refracted the world around me, gave me hope and despair in equal measure, let me bask in its atmospheres and complexities, convinced me I understood the artform and assured me I wasn't the only one who felt like 'this', whatever 'this' meant.

2022: Listening to early Justin Bieber and liking it.

Is this the result of my music taste becoming more relaxed and being ... read more

It's annoying really, because 43% of this gives the Animal Collective and Bon Iver albums released the same year a run for their money. If you whittle this down to 3 songs (the title track, Eggshell, Pumped from Above) you get some of the best not-quite-pop of 2016 (or maybe the late 2010s et al idk I'm not attuned to this shit) - knotty but not convoluted, playful but not arch, songful but not simplistic, all kooky sounds springing to the front in bizarre ways without devolving into ... read more

Fuck, man. Turns out emo guitar + sultry heartbroken vocals + bustling garage/drill groove is all we needed out of music, you can throw away whatever Swift album or post-punk act you're currently clinging onto. That faded vocal sample coming in like radio chatter before the beat kicks in - God, that genuinely hurts. Single of the year, for sure.

Hoping this dude has an album on the way, this stuff is way too good to just be a loosie.

Fun! Maybe the first non-Fuse solo HudMo thing that clicked with me (I tried with Butter a few times but the drums always got in the way - too plastic, too thuddy and plodding). It's like low-rent Lex Luger knockoffs morphing into vibrant floor-fillers, all sparkling colours and absurd brass synths. A reminder that this stuff (trap, future bass) used to be attention-grabbing instead of "vibey" muzak for Spotify ads.

Also ffs get off of Reddit. Cbat is fine outside the context of ... read more

Oh, okay, now I know what the Samurai Music roster has been cribbing from this entire time. Hard to pick out one chune from the next, and you can hear it become noticably simpler as it goes on, but there's a spark here, and that's more than I can say for a lot of the early 2000s drum and bass coming out around the same time. Either way, neat shit, especially the first half, which sounds like it's taking up from where Adam F's Metropolis left off, or if Photek only started making stuff after ... read more

There's more energy here than the stuff Lavelle and co. would put out at the same time - I mostly like to think it's because someone stopped him from slapping sappy string sections on everything - and the first 20 minutes imply a return into '90s-era Mo Wax trickery, which is nice. But soon it devolves into gloomy alt-rock sludge and tepid early 2000s electronica, alongside some straight-up butcherings of Psyence Fiction-era songs. Whatever snatches of good music you can dig up from the gloop ... read more

I mean, if nothing else it's an interesting curio. I went into this expecting a run-of-the-mill chop and slop of L'Amour, but it's not really that - the original songs are warped beyond recognition, smeared and morphed into distant drones, Lewis' already indicpherable voice sliced into oblivion. And when he's working with that formula, the effect is lovely, like the faded '80s pop of the original deconstructing itself into a free-form haze. Unfortunately, that's half of the mixtape - the other ... read more

Yeah, yeah, the vocals aren't great - it's not only the autotune, dude just sounds like he's pinching his nose while singing. And the attempts at social commentary (yes, the Blue (Da Ba Dee) guys have several tracks dedicated to bemoaning the hollowness of modern society and capitalism and whatever) don't really elicit anything other than "bless 'em for trying". But I've spent too much time in my preteens watching that CG mess of a video for Blue that saying anything bad about this ... read more

Looser, scuzzier and more consistent than Dark Grapes II, with the tradeoff being that nothing here is as mindblowingly transcendent as Perfect Skies or Chuch (although, I mean to be fair, what is?) Still, stuff like Legion of Doom and I'm Official should give you a reason to respect the duo as perpetually unsung legends of the cloud rap scene - and it's not just the chopped-up Imogen Heap samples and Clams Casino beats, it's the endearing shagginess of Squadda and Mondre as rappers, even at ... read more

Less glossy and less hooky than its predecessor, it's also, uh, less good. The sun-soaked excuberance is subdued in favor of a rougher, more electro-house-y edge. This works at some points (it's hard not to respect the audacity of the Stooges-sampling Doggystyle), doesn't at others (those garish, butt-ugly synths that become more prominent in the second half), but overall the joyousness is sorely missed - to put it bluntly these trax aren't as catchy. The contributions from Le Knight Club are ... read more

Don't get scared or otherwised misinformed by the goregrind-looking cover. This is a set of slick French touch, courtesy of Pepe Bradock and Ark.

The number of trip-hoppy interludes - even if they do manage to be vaguely sleek and sexy instead of the usual corny pastiche - outweigh the number of house tracks here, which I'm not a fan of. I'm willing to let that slide because when it slips into house, it's killer. Atom Funk is so good that Bradock repurposed it for his debut album - a barrage ... read more

Euphoric, if not exactly dancefloor ready - stabs and samples fed through a machine that just refuses to load, spitting out fragments and stammering like a Source game on a low-end PC, backed up by convulsing rhythms. Not sure if I'm gonna hear another "experimental electronica" (any better terms out there?) release this year more colourful. Fuck if I know how this represents 'how we express emotions and how they are sent back in the internet era', though.

Can't really tell you I ... read more

Sometimes it lapses into the same problems that breakcore often has - namely the breaks being too chopped and warped to the point where it stops being impressive and starts being masturbatory tedium, like some prog-metal guitarist plucking a hundred notes without any of them resonating. Otherwise it's what I want out of jungle now that the atmospheric stuff has lost a little of its magic - ragga samples over violently hard-hitting beats, every Amen and Think break sparking like steel on an ... read more

Your affinity for this will depend how much you can stomach near-10-minute drum workouts - the frantic break editing does not let up, even when it slows down, and there's not much else to sink into other than some dystopian ambience swelling in the background. More mechanical than jungle's choppage (there aren't many breaks here that you'd find chopped on your averaged Suburban Base record - no Amens or Thinks) and more propulsive than techstep's static chase beats, you have to find yourself ... read more

Eccojams' cooler, fun-loving older brother. He's just as zoned out, but he spends more time at afterparties than in empty shopping malls.

Think of this as the exact median point between UK garage and dubstep, the CGI child-animal hybrid on the Animorphs cover. The latter hasn't quite coalesced into an actual movement yet, and you can tell - you aren't going to mistake those swinging, shuffling beats for a Deep Medi release. And yet there's something being pushed forward here, something that separates this from the garage appearing on Ministry Of Sound compilations at the time. Not many glossy diva vocals, not many nods to pop ... read more

If the repeating mantras of 'Jet Generation' and 'Mimetic' hinted at Oli XL's movement towards 'songs' instead of 'tracks', consider this the full-on pop moment. His autotuned baby coo takes a bit to get used to, so I think it's good that he brings Instupendo on this in a sort of call-and-response, sounding like two androids calling in from different space stations (helps that unlike ECCO2K it doesn't sound like he just phoned in at the last minute). And the production - with its springing, ... read more

If not the best of the old jungle cassette tapes I have decided to base my entire personality around, it's the one I've listened to that whips the most ass. You should know the deal by now - Amen and Think breaks fucked with and thrown around like a toddler playing with toy soldiers, sub bass bursting through the tape, Hoovers and stabs buzzing around like moths around a light. And it's topped with by Hype flaunting his scratching skills through a few tracks. Makes Jungle Massive sound like a ... read more