The best new singles this week

by Juno Daily on 03.03.2022 at 18:30pm.
Last edited: 03.03.2022 at 18:30pm.

Our writers pluck the singles they love from the week’s releases

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

Hospital Records mainstay Logistics makes a welcome return to release action after a two-year break, more than making up for his absence with six expressive tracks on the ‘Love Letters’ EP. Matt ‘Logistics’ Gresham emerged way back in the late ’90s as part of a troupe of talented D&B creators based in the unlikely but thoroughly nurturing surroundings of sunny Cambridge, England. Alongside elder brother Nu Tone and the Commix duo, the collective maintained a self-sustaining scene in the university city, propelled and strengthened by their regular Spoonfed nights – as well as the raucous and long-serving Warning events that helped fuel the Cambridge drum & bass fire. Decades later, each of the key players is still thriving in the field, and Logistics continues to light up the ever-compelling Hospital Records roster with his well-formed releases. Exhibiting his trademark melodic flair and harmonic density throughout, ‘Love Letters’ finds Gresham in sparkling form.

The tender harmonies and poignant vocals of the title track ensure it’s just as likely to inspire deep meditation as to trigger rhythmic impulses, with floating melodies gliding across rolling drums over a seductive arrangement. The vigorous tempo and anthemic strings vocal stabs of ‘Vega’ present an obvious standout, powering over drum rolls and infectious organ riffs. Next, the gentle 2 step of ‘Continuation’ flips the script, blurring stylistic boundaries as evocative piano keys combine with honeyed vocals and held-down bass. Zoe Phillips enters the fray with a stirring vocal performance on the crossover contender ‘Secret Satellite’, before Frank H Carter III grasps the baton to belt out his baritone on the no-less radio-friendly ‘Nightingale’. Finally, EP closer ‘Pleasure’ returns to floor-focused realms, with cosmic synths slaloming over propulsive drums as speak and spell vocals echo across the horizon. Varied, compelling, and immaculately produced throughout, ‘Love Letters’ will leave fans hoping they don’t have to wait another two years to hear more from this gifted creator.

Manonmars & Bogues X Ishan Sound & Neek – Burning Paper EP (Dno)

If you ever thought Young Echo’s Manonmars and Bogues were confined to slow-mo raps over laconic beats from the likes of O$VMV$M, think again. Breaking away from their usual Bristolian enclave to drop a release on Brighton label Dno, this is still a Young Echo release in all but name. The production comes from core crew members Neek, one half of O$VMV$M, and Ishan Sound, who usually opts for a springy strain of steppas and soundsystem gear. The beats still have a certain woozy, tape-crunched surrealism, but they’re also more forthright, quite possibly at the behest of the MCs.

Across his two outstanding solo albums Manonmars has shaped himself as the ultimate in stoner rap, extolling the virtues of the reefer amidst imaginative flows delivered with a slow, slurry swagger. But on the A side of this release he first takes on a beat from Neek and Ishan which brings out a fiercely kinetic dimension to his style. ‘Cool Runnings’ steps in hard with a crisp, trap-licked riddim sprinkled with 64-bit game tones which echo Mars’ chat about split-screens. But it’s his delivery which snaps your head off, leaning in hard and firing off his words in double-time without stumbling. ‘Nuke The Threat’ with an Ishan production might be a touch murkier with Mars run through effects which emphasise his drawl, but atop the crisp snap of the beat it still feels like a fresh approach.

Bogues joins in on the B side, as he and Mars both get the pitch-warped treatment for a particularly druggy end result. Bogues’ stance on ‘Skinhead Chick’ cuts through as the perfect foil to Mars’ heavy-lidded verse, opting for a style which sounds like rap after the most ruthless elocution lessons. In the context of this pointedly weirdo production, it feels like another arch swerve, but this plummy style actually lands throughout the strength of Bogues’ timing and the sharp cut of the lyrics. That leaves the crew to finalise their claim to the crown with ‘Burning Papers’, perhaps the illest of the cuts on the record capturing something of a more classic hip hop approach, albeit with a freaked-out nightmare beat to roll on.

Just outside the usual labels they lurk around, there is indeed something fresh about the approach from all parties on this record, but the non-conformist spirit is no less than you expect, and the unrelenting skill is a given.

Tom Ellis – Almost Mythical EP (Birds)

Although his sound has plenty which aligns it with the broader minimal house scene, Tom Ellis operates in his own field. Since the early days of the Trimsound label he ran with Leif, Ellis has exuded an irrepressible sense of groove, nurturing an inherent sound shaped by smoky, augmented chords and shuffling, jazz-informed drums, but never sounding uninspired. His is a subtle approach, wonderfully rendered on relatively recent albums like From The Cabin Above The Clouds and The Colour Red, where live percussion and rhythmic synthesis intertwine in understated ways, and mellifluous notes and keys wrap themselves around dusty samples and vocal snatches without demonstrating any distance between them.

It’s been a little quiet on the release front for Ellis recently, with his last solo EP being A Sense Of Something Else on Swedish label Lyssna Records, but he inaugurates new Chilean label Birds with three tracks which beautifully sum up just what makes his sophisticated approach to house music so unerringly satisfying. ‘Das’ takes the lead with the most conventionally minimal offering of the record – a steadfast, hat-rich construction carrying a plethora of smudged impressions shaping out a heavy-lidded, early morning mood crying out for those moments of journeying inwards on the dancefloor.

‘Almost Mythical’, while still adhering to a 4/4 beat, has a wholly different flavour which places the melodic content front and centre. That content comes in the form of swirling washes of chords and an addictive, rubbery lead line that sounds like it could be coming from a Moog. It moves with the flex of a human hand, and taps into that sweet, soulful spot you’d readily associate with the best broken beat – a vibe helped no end by the detached beauty of the unnamed female vocals. ‘Emblems’ strikes a tone somewhere in between these two tracks, locking into a simmering groove but keeping space for some of that lounge-minded musicality that spills out of Ellis’ music.

Sealing the package with another cult outlier from the wider minimal scene, we’re also treated to a remix of ‘Emblem’ by French producer Pit Spector, who brings a distinct personality to the track with a busier mix but plenty of the original beating away in the centre. It’s a fitting follow up to Ellis’ own adventures into less travelled corners of the house music spectrum, where invention and sincere expression take precedence over perceived scene formulae.

Felinto – Nao Tem Volta (Bokeh Versions)

Dreams are the brain’s attempts to codify our waking lives into memory, resulting in cryptic but nonsensical midnight ‘stories’. With that in mind, we’ve no doubts about this one: brace yourself for a dream-themed masterclass in Brazilian ambience, maximized to the tape-hued brim. For it, Sao Paolo artist Felinto is enlisted by Bokeh Versions, manifesting an ‘immersive sound experience’ created with multi-instrumentalists Eddu Ferreira (Cosmogun) and M. Takara.

The gradually unfurling nature of ‘Nao Tem Volta’ draws inspiration from dreams, and “the generative nature of the unconscious”. Generativity is a concept that, when applied to music, results in fractal sonic patterns. A limited set of rules, in other words, govern seemingly limitless variations on a motif, never stopping. With that in mind, this album’s proceeds serve funds for Guarani indigenous people, a subset of whom have been suffering systematic attacks by the Brazilian police state. The culmination of these influences results in a myriad album that asks: “when will we return to waking life?”.

The half-hour project opens with a low bass drone. It’s the kind of sonic background radiation that might represent universal consciousness, canopying all lived experience, while at the same time sounding like the near-silence every human hears before drifting off to sleep. Glitching, disembodied alto voices of souls rise out from the thicket, trembling and wailing in the night. As dreams segway into each other, so do each of the four tracks, seamlessly; track two emerges as a synth ostinato that lasts for a good while, while radio static and earthy interference rattles and sizzles about the stereo field, and great pads flap and splash across the horizon. We can’t help but remind ourselves of the sound design heard in the recent film Memoria, which explores similar themes of indigenous displacement and terrestriality, filtered through a dreamy lens.

An uncertain sax improv section opens into the album’s meatiest part. Strange rattles, ghostly human wails, and Moogy wave-twists all reverberate out, making us feel like we’ve just unwelcomely trespassed on a forbidden ghosts’ procession or ‘fox wedding’. A final ease-up of the bass, and sole focus on vocals, implies that our dreamers have been set free.

JIJ

Magic Source ‘Riviera Drive’ (Favourite)

Magic Source are back on Favourite Music with some of their most infectious work to date, packing the sunblock, beach towels and neatly fitting swimwear for a sun-soaked jaunt around the Cote d’Azur. The virtuoso pairing of Björn Wagner and Tim Grunwald work together on a variety of projects – notably the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band – accumulating innumerable performance credits on all-manner of alluring releases. With each of their releases recorded under the Magic Source moniker having arrived on Favourite, it appears they’ve found a happy home on the funk-flecked French imprint. As the EP title suggests, their latest offering is rich with chic seafront imagery, and the music is every bit as warm and inviting as glistening sapphire waves gently lapping golden shores.

The title track softly unfolds over sensual percussion and Afro-inspired guitar plucks, elevating into life with the arrival of stirring horn, shimmering pads and a limber synth solo. Appearing in both extended and radio-friendly mixes, it’s sure to be heard echoing across sophisticated beach clubs and balmy dancefloors over the soon-to-arrive summer months, constructed, as it is, to ignite Balearic bliss. Featuring alongside it is a rather lovely interpretation of a much-loved and often-sampled post-disco gem, ‘Genius Of Love’. The Tom Tom club original is a stone-cold classic, thanks in no small part to Steven Stanley’s ludicrously catchy synth riff and Tina Weymouth’s masterful bass strokes. Here, Magic Source dispense with the Nursery Rhyme vocal, opting to interpret the lead melodies via a floating flute solo. You need some serious musical chops to do justice to such a beloved composition, and by respectfully morphing the track into lazy poolside territory, the duo do a magnificent job, completing a sublime EP in the process.

Coded Forms – Red Liminal (Confused House)

Cryptic dub techno is all the rage at the minute, and New York’s Confused House imprint might just be clocking onto its current hype, having been stalwarts of that game since 2013 but not having put anything out since for 5 years. Now, in 2022, they return to fore with a 3-tracker from Coded Forms, a new duo comprised of label boss Jason Letkiewicz and newcomer producer M. Khokhlov.

Hard to put your finger on, this EP reveals less at first than it could in terms of how evidently top-notch the production is, proving this pair aren’t concerned with overexertion and flagrant showing off for the sake of it. Lead track ‘Red Liminal’ is a synthy foray through delayed channely dub, downtempo yet hissing in its stab refractions, which recall the peaker moments heard in Moritz Von Oswald’s music. This one’s a meditation on a riff, though, teasing no drums or development beyond a call and response pattern.

Many more ideas are fleshed out on the subsequent tracks, however, proving there’s more to the pair’s palette than teasy laser-shots. ‘Lower Your Pulse’ brings things even further downtempo, operating in a slow ¾ time. Futuristic breathalizer synths, and metallic ricochets, writhe around in a dry-ice chamber, cocooned by a cage of coldwave beats. Dubbiness prevails, while the real star of the show is ‘Scatter Point’, a crossrhythmic dramatism of dubious bass gyrations and and madhouse pops and whirs. In the producers’ own words, the track is “going, going, gone”, like an endless game of dub whack-a-mole.

JIJ

Jamie Paton ‘Parabolas’ (Hoga Nord)

London-based Jamie Paton returns to Swedish label Hoga Nord with his first release since 2019, serving a pair of heads-down heaters on this most hypnotic of 7’s. Known for his Cage & Avery collaborations with Nigel Hoyle, DJ, producer (and graphic designer) Paton has released a slow but sure stream of titles on roundly agreeable labels – with Emotional (Especial), Multi Culti, and Bahnsteig 23 among those to have championed his solo work. Always ready to embrace the more wonky-eyed realms of electronic music, Paton journeys deep into wiggy realms on the title track, ‘Parabolas’. Meandering through a disorienting haze, the hypnotic chug patiently unfolds through paranoid shadows and moonlit synth staccatos, as dissonant swells and glitches swirl through the sultry air.

Just as atmospheric and ever so slightly more robust, B-side track ‘Fleshed Out’ continues the narcotic theme, with its thick kick drum solidifying the groove as hooky stabs undulate over dubbed-out synth claps and sinewy pads. With barely a melody in sight on either track, the release revels in its abstract leanings. Deep, grubby, and dark like the moon, this nocturnally charmed work from Paton is eyes-closed material, built for esoteric backrooms and half-lit introspection.

DJ Sports – Smoking & Drinking EP (Fresh 86)

At this point in time it’s hard to dispute the idea DJ Sports’ modern take on jungle is some of the freshest out there. The Danish powerhouse otherwise known as Milan Zaks has created a mythos around his prolific, many-sided output which in some ways echoes DJ Sotofett and the Sex Tags universe. They’re stylistically very different, but there’s a similar blend of deep-rooted dance music tradition and stylish verve, which means they rarely miss.

Landing on Fresh 86, this new four-tracker perfectly sums up Sports’ superlative approach. It’s jungle through and through, with everything a breakbeat devotee could wish for in terms of deft edits, heavyweight bass and so fort. But it’s the textural and compositional ideas which set Sports apart, not least on stunning lead track ‘Rebel Head’ For a start the breaks are beautifully chopped, but equally the wobbly delights of the lead synth line makes for a unique emotional slant to the track, at once nostalgic, futuristic, odd but ultimately cute. ‘Smoking & Drinking’ is a rougher cut with a denser knit to the drums, tipping towards the Paradox school of extravagant programming, but also teasing a little drill n’ bass intensity and equally knowing how to pull it back for more reflective passages. Quite simply, the tracks dance in your ears with a carbonated zest, like the soundsystem equivalent of a fresh hit from a Soda Stream.

Organized Konfusion – The Demos (30th Anniversary) (Smoke On)

Of course hip-hop culture is stuffed to the brim with overlooked legends who didn’t get the shine of their peers, but to this reviewer’s ears none are more deserving of an all-time greatest title than Organized Konfusion. Prince Po and Pharoahe Monch started out as Simply II Positive MCs before switching their name and signing to Hollywood Basic to release their seminal, self-titled, self-produced album in 1991. Their follow-up, Stress: The Extinction Agenda was even better, but the group never quite broke through like some of their peers and Po and Monch went on to solo careers.

Prior to their debut album though, Monch and Po recorded a demo which has been faithfully captured and documented by German hip hop reissue devotees Smoke On. ‘Prisoners Of War’ features in a rawer form prior to the version on the debut album, coming on heavier on the bass but with the same incisive flows, and ‘Audience Pleasers’ still bounces with infectious, upbeat energy. But of course it’s the unreleased bits which hold the most interest, and they all more than stand up to the group’s legacy.

‘Mind Over Matter’ is a rich patchwork of funk licks with a snappy tempo, and ‘International Arrival’ keeps the vibe punchy and raw, balancing OK’s party-starting nous with their acerbic lyricism. If you always wished for more from one of East Coast hip-hop’s all-time greats, then you’re in for a treat with this welcome reissue.

This week’s reviewers: Oli Warwick, Patrizio Cavaliere, Jude Iago James.