Joey Anderson – From One Mind To Another
It feels like Joey Anderson’s daring and intricate house assemblages and Latency’s musical bravado were fated to meet for a short but utterly sweet twenty-five minutes in 2013. After all, both the New Yorker’s recognisable beat flex and the French label itself are only young contributors to the game, with the former having appeared on just over ten EPs in the last three years – a rather prodigious output compared to most of his other New York contemporaries – and the latter being on their second but already impressive release after last year’s magnificent Post Industrial debut from Hakim Murphy and Ike Release’s Innerspace Halflife project. All in all, two characteristically different spheres of music which are both young and raring to get their sound noticed and embedded into our neural pathways.
Joey Anderson’s ability to elicit feelings of amazement and surprise with each new production are second to none, and are boldly displayed throughout From One Mind To The Other thanks to the man’s reductionist, eccentric approach to house music. That being said, it’s precisely Anderson’s shredded beat formulas and diluted keys which allow him to congeal even the strangest of melodies within his arrangements, coming out the other end with a dazzling vortex of dark but defiantly nostalgic patterns of sound.
The fact that “Press Play” omits a bassline altogether and yet still succeeds in finding a powerful, grinding rhythm is extraordinary in itself. What’s even more striking is Anderson’s ability to preserve his characteristic flair over something so abstract as this A-side, a track which could sound just as enchanting and melancholic without the presence of that robust 4/4 kick drum pounding away in the core of the mix. In fact, it’s the track’s deranged and bundled mass of stuttering, alien vocal samples and Vangelis-style melodics which create the resemblance of a large and potentially volatile space shuttle, with the only ingredient of serenity being the strangely juxtaposed piano keys trailing awkwardly in the atmosphere – a compound of sounds which together make for a fascinating acoustic landscape.
Although “Mind Set” possesses a similarly bizarre collection of samples and eerie atmospherics, not to mention Anderson’s familiar synth wizardry, it’s somewhat more contained when placed next to the musical oddity and irregularity of its precursor. In any case, the repetition of “mind set, mind set, it’s definitely a mindset”, carries with it enough deviation from the norm to satisfy all of our expectations from Anderson. Moreover, it’s undoubtedly his mixture of intricate, liquid beat paradigms, murmuring low-frequencies and purposely imperfect use of vocals which make this track so extravagant and representative of his own touch.
Even the aptly named “Attitude”, which has the guts to steer a seemingly club-friendly piece of music down an incessant wormhole of convoluted keys and droning melodies, contains enough mystique to work both off and on the dance floor with equal success. What’s even more exceptional is Anderson’s ability to weave a unitary thread through each one of the three tracks, boldly manifested by the apparently recurrent space theme, and hence create an EP which works as an entity and stands out from the crowd. Whether these tracks will be played at peak-times in dark basements, on a pair of headphones or on the score of some future sci-fi film, Joey Anderson’s music can only be credited as individualistic and captivating, complex and refreshing.
Pietro Barbieri-h
Tracklist:
A1. Press Play
B1. Mind Set
B2. Attitude