bass/breaks/techno/house/kitchen sink

Graze keep up their excellent track record with this new one. This is hard to categorize bass music, seamlessly blending techy four-on-the-floor tendencies and jungley breakbeat tendencies. Intricately constructed, with idiosyncratic rhythms and rich textures. As usual for this duo, it’s restrained enough to keep you coming back for repeated listens, but immediate enough to grab you the first time around. Works well whether you’re in the left lane on 280, on the dancefloor, or buried in your headphones at home. Bonus wiki factoid: “A soft gamma repeater is an astronomical object which emits large bursts of gamma-rays and X-rays at irregular intervals.”

RIYL: Joe, Pearson Sound, Untold, Pangaea, Blawan, Four Tet’s from Ringer onward

1. ominous encroaching midrange synths wrapped in airy atmospheric pads. shuffling beat starts to enter after :30, with just stuttery kicks and hats. background plaintive stretched female vocals and sandpaper sounds. beat accretes slowly, with small new percussive elements being added through the midway point. beat leaves for a while after 3:30, doesn’t come back in till 4:10. 7:01
2. hits the ground running. housey kicks and claps, but with ticky 808 hats, and occasional other deeper kicks to keep it a bit off-kilter overall. synth whirlpools of varying diameter and depth. leaves on just the glowing watery keyboard line that’s threaded throughout the whole thing. the least weird thing on here, but still kinda weird. 6:15
3. starts with a basic four on the floor kick, but with one thrown off every other bar. slight echo on the kicks makes it all sound a little cavernous. rising/pulsing/filtered synth line and snapping cymbals. liquid echoed something or other in the background staring just after 2:00. it all keeps threatening to boil over, but never quite does (not a bad thing). this is a great start to a 4 am second wind. 6:17
4. it all starts off sounding so unthreatening, with those housey chords… but then that squelch that just came in is kind of weird. and those woodblocks and snares do have a strange gait. no kicks till 1:30, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. things are feeling rather sinister... maybe this is actually going to be really nasty? yes! yes. slowed down, screwed up jungle. relentless but methodical. would feel right at home next to millie & andrea or the demdike stare testpressing stuff. precision destruction, like a large factory being imploded. 8:04
5. opens with big fat kicks, nonsense syllables, and undulating high end. bright woodblocks added not long after, and a growling bassline just after 1:00. kicks start to go off-kilter just after 1:30, but the whole thing is pleasantly disorienting right from the start. a bit of a “where the hell am i?” breather after #4. 5:11
6. thick warm fuzzy synth line, kicks with no decay, other percussive elements rattling around the kick. fuzz gets filtered as a sonar ping starts cutting through it. turns into a breakbeat just after 1:30, goes back to 4x4 around 3:00, back to breaks at 3:30. filtered female “yeah”s start up just before 4:00. 5:32
7. beatless, but not really ambient, since it’s still so rhythmic. basically a short techno sketch where all the explicitly percussive elements have been extracted. decaf techno, if you will. reminds me of ricardo donoso, who’s made whole albums of stuff like this. 3:09

recommended: 4, 1, 7