2021 Review: Top Tunes (Part 2)
Second part of my Top Tunes of 2021 - this year, in a format where each entry comes with a bonus track that is somehow related (in my head at least). There should be three parts in total.
Click through the links to buy on bandcamp (where possible) and enjoy!
The Abstract Eye – Back In Balance (Equilibrium) [Neroli]
Conductor of machines, weaver of dreams: The Abstract Eye aka Gifted & Blessed aka Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker ploughs his own furrow, albeit one with multiple sub-furrows that take in dance music, synth experimentalism, avant-soul (as The Steoples) and traditional Puerto Rican music (as Frankie Reyes).
What unites them all is his musicianship, always coaxing the soul out of the machines he ’conducts’. This EP for Volcov’s label Neroli was no different – four digital symphonies with synths that sound like they are both laughing and crying. From joy or from loneliness, it’s difficult to tell.
+ BONUS
Lerosa – Universal Balance [Welt Discos]
Lerosa is another producer who just does his own thing. In my head he also comes off as a sort of maestro of his studio, getting his machines to sing. Leo is an old friend so it was a no-brainer to ask him if he’d like to release an EP on Welt Discos, and I ended up closing my Truants mix with the B2, ‘Universal Balance’. It’s an electro meditation that naturally inhabits the same emotional territory as ‘Back In Balance’.
I interviewed Leo on Carpet’s mix series earlier this year if you want to read more about his process and attitude towards bongos:
Nick Bong is a Singaporean producer who contributed this track to the Double Happiness Vol 1 compilation on FuFu Records earlier this year. There have since been three more volumes, each showcasing electronic music from across Asia and raising money for the One Tree Planted initiative. There’s a lot of great tunes to choose from on these comps but ‘Swell’ is my pick for its sheer scale. I don’t often play really big-room stuff but this one convinced me with its crafty and patient build up (that titular ‘swell’) and the pay off when the 4/4 kick finally comes in, more than 3 minutes of the way through. Just in case it needs saying: your phone will not do this justice.
+ BONUS
Baalti - Ustad [Krunk Kulture]
Another track I heard about via a compilation of music by Asian producers – in this case Krunk Kulture’s excellent ‘Flavours Of The East’ series – ‘Ustad’ made its way into my Dimensions podcast thanks to its driving groove, optimistic harmonies and clever (and surprisingly heavy) mid-track break. The track would go on to form part of Baalti’s debut self-titled EP, incorporating the sounds of old Indian records into an up to date dance music format.
ES-Q – You Create We Destroy [Dolly]
While there’s been an undeniable interest in the 80s in the rather narrow scene I spend quite a lot of time in, the 90s remain the principal reference of choice for most producers. As ever, some derivations fall flat while others succeed, either via clever adaptation or through sheer musicality. ES-Q’s second EP for Dolly falls into this latter camp, taking the formula of what the leading lights of UK techno (FSOL, Rob Gordon, Luke Slater etc) were doing circa 91-94 and expertly reproducing it across four outright bangers.
The one truly ‘wow’ moment on this stellar EP is that huge rave hoover that appears halfway through the title track – first there’s the hoover itself, and second there’s the way it somehow then harmonises with the rest of the track. I’d wanted to hear this out for a while until finally Dolly label head Steffi played it here in Lisbon a few weeks ago. It was as huge as I expected.
+ BONUS
Enrica Falqui - Aquarius [Marginal Returns]
On the B side of her debut solo EP, Enrica Falqui drew from the same era as ES-Q but looking more to Detroit than to Sheffield, with ‘Plexus’ sounding like a Code Industry outtake and ‘Aquarius’ riding a rapid fire electro groove and brooding bassline that were both pure UR. Contrast this with the contemplative A-side, which struck me as more in line with later 90s output from, say, Ampoule or Svek, and you have an EP where both sides – and all five tracks – really count.
Black Rave Culture – Columbia Rd (Uptown) [Haus Of Altr]
A kind of dubby mood piece named for the BRC trio’s home state of Washington DC, from its 2-steppy gait the inspiration for ‘Columbia Rd’ could just as well have been the London flower market. Freshest among the admittedly very few UKG variations I listened to this year (K-Lone’s Tasty001 also a winner), this track stood out for its enveloping atmosphere and emotional keys and synth work – the latter as if Stinson had sat down one day and decided to make a garage tune.
+ BONUS
AceMoMA - Finding Polaris [Haus Of Altr]
Two LPs of this quality in a single year is a stunning achievement for Haus Of Altr. With its genre- and tempo-agnostic hi-tech jazz, Haus Of Altr boss AceMoMA’s A Future LP put me in mind of a sort of Nighttime World Vol 3. But where Robert Hood mostly downed the intensity and upped the jazz between NW Vol 1 and Vol 2, AceMoMA ups the intensity significantly, melding Hood’s template with the harder and faster strains of 90s dance music (hardcore, dnb, jungle). At 133bpm, ‘Finding Polaris’ is one of the albums more serene moments, and is also the tune that hews most closely to the original ‘Nighttime’.
Ray Kandinski – Zonin [Lobster Theremin]
Candidate for overall record of the year, Ray Kandinski’s Garant EP somehow packs six glorious tracks of joyful rave energy into one piece of vinyl. I say ‘somehow’ but we know how: the tracks average about 4 minutes long, which is pretty much the only criticism I might have about the record were it not also something that makes it even more of a thrill to DJ with.
The recipe for ‘Zonin’, the track I’ve played the most, suits this compact format to a T: start with 1 minute of a breaksy tech house drum intro that’s full of attitude, add one of the biggest bassline drops of the year, follow this soon after with one of the smoothest pad drops of the year, and stir the whole lot around once more before serving.
Sound basic? It’s dancefloor dynamite.
+ BONUS
Basement Space – Cosmonaut [Butter Side Up]
Another lads lads lads roller, I actually ignored this track when it first came out in favour of the less lairy tunes elsewhere on the same record. But then I heard it being played in Carpet one day and realised it was the outright banger of this EP. One curious thing about it is that the mid-track breaks are not regular durations, so if you’re counting bars normally the drop will catch you out every time. So it’s an ‘Am I gonna find the first beat?’ thriller instead of ‘Am I gonna let this run out?’ thriller. But it’s always nice to have a little added frisson for the DJ.
Sedef Adasi – Mermaids On Acid [Public Possession]
As fully formed a debut EP as you could imagine, Sedef Adasi’s Fantasy Zone landed back in June, poised and resplendent in its trappings of synth pop, Chicago house and 90s Euro-techno. The B-side, which was trailed on her excellent mix for Maricas earlier in the year, is a sure dancefloor killer, but for me it’s the A-side that has lasted the distance.
First there’s the craftily constructed ‘Gel Gidelim’ (“let’s go” in Turkish?), whose broody electro intro opens out unexpectedly into deep and funky techno – a grower not a shower. And then there’s ‘Mermaids On Acid’, which I can only describe as ‘Dirty Talk’ but transposed into some dystopian future. It’s pure pop, fun, sexy, and immensely danceable.
+ BONUS
Doildoshi – Forest Illumination [More Rice]
Speaking of dystopian futures, Go Dam’s music could easily work as the soundtrack to a Blade Runner-style epic. This record, released under the alias Doildoshi by Bangkok-based label and record store More Rice, performs the same trick as the releases on his own label Braindance: modern sounding synthesized music with an 80s pop sensibility, using East Asian melodic and harmonic signifiers that both gel with and intentionally interrupt American/European frameworks – electro, acid house, freestyle, industrial, EBM – in an invigoratingly original way.
The whole EP is astonishing, but check ‘Forest Illumination’ in particular for a kind of Simple Minds-meets-Dave-Monolith fantasy. Is there anyone else making music that sounds like this?!