Futureproofing #2: Ryce Recommends

A quick one: a roundup of some of my favourite records of the second half of 2024, and a word about the mainstreaming of the former underground.

Hello friends. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot—thank you subscribers!—so here is a selection of some of my favourite releases of the summer and early fall. It's a bit of a grab bag, but it's simply what I'm most into, from Bristol post-trip-hop to LA new-school prog house to Rrose's fantastic new album.

In other news, I wrote about Honey Dijon's DJ-Kicks mix for Pitchfork, which got me thinking about the mainstreaming of dance music over the past six or seven years. Sure, it happened really fast—but it was also gradual, almost sneaking up on us, to the point that DJs like Four Tet are headlining Coachella. Honey's mix is somehow both trendy and approachable (vocal house music) but also "underground" as hell (made up of very obscure '90s records). As I said in my last post, it's proof that there are no borders anymore—everything is popular, and the most popular and best-selling stuff is cool in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago. The centre cannot hold, or rather, it is holding. The centre is where it's at.

So, here's an attempt to outline some stuff that is left of centre, or maybe just outside the circle altogether. I'll be back next week with a profile of the exciting new label False Aralia and a few other reviews.

Jabu - A Soft and Gatherable Star [do you have peace?]

The Bristol vibes continue with a key act that came up around the same time I was in Bristol, as outlined in my first post—but who quickly moved from post-dubstep to downtempo, dub and eventually trip-hop. Jabu (started by producer Amos Childs and now a fully-fledged band featuring Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt) have inched towards a sound that combines Bristol's tradition of hypnotic slate-gray music with dubbed-out techniques and, on this new LP, a distinct thread of post-punk. For this LP, they dug out some instruments none of them were very good at and gathered at Childs' mother's house to make an album inspired by poetry, geography and death.

A Soft and Gatherable Star moves at a snail's pace. Guitar chords unfold glacially, though not in a slowcore sense. Even at their most staid, there's still a sense of groove to the band. "Košice Flower" approximates a stilted hip-hop loop through the lens of a band learning their way around their gear, while on "Gently Fade," featuring fellow Bristolian Birthmark, Butt's guitar moves with the intuitive slither of a Neil Young guitar solo. The songs feel like they're drifting down from a musty attic, the vocals ensconced in a reverb that that carries smell of old records and books. Drum machines blink in the fog, holding the tracks aloft and connecting A Soft and Gatherable Star to its more electronic predecessors, but the overall effect is more post-punk than anything else. With the current gold rush of hyped (and often affected) UK post-punk bands, I'm not sure anyone's doing it as beautifully—or as intimately—as Jabu.

Space Master - Homeworld [Self-released]

Up until now, I knew Space Master mostly as a DJ. In Los Angeles, she's one of those DJs usually booked for support or closing who can easily eclipse a headliner or out-of-town guest. She's also one of a few DJs in the scene who clearly loves vintage progressive house and the other once-passé genres that orbited around in its heyday: tribal house, breaks, trance. On debut EP Homeworld, she pays tribute to the corner aspects of prog, like the skittering insectoid basslines, or the tendrils of synth that scurry across the stereo spectrum. Think mid-period Sasha or peak-era Hybrid. You'll hardly find a more faithful homage than "The Theme," which sounds like it's vibrating on Vyvanse, with a heartfelt melody that moves a little too fast—think Moby's "Go" all grown up, innocence long discarded.

For all the speed demon antics (the twitchy "Macrobiotics"), there's an almost sentimental outpouring of emotion here that reminds me of Dntel or Christian Löffler. "Seekers," with its sputtering vocal and clacking wooden drums, splits the difference between old and new prog, while "Skybound" soars with a twinkling synth lead that could've been borrowed from a Chicane album. Homeworld succeeds not only because it channels prog house in its full, sometimes goofy splendor, but doesn't hold back on the feeling, either.

Tondiue - Word to the Centipede [Kelp Roots]

Seattle has produced a number of excellent dance music producers out a small scene—CCL was just talking about this with Tim Sweeney—that's always losing members and adding new ones (the same brain drain that affects most unaffordable West Coast cities). I've been a fan of tondiue’s since the Painted Creature EP came out in 2021. They're a master of extended live jams that take a leisurely journey from point A to point B, and unlike so much dance music, can sound completely different once they reach the other end. Casual track-seekers beware. 

Take the punchy percussive monster "Glyph," which shape-shifts enough across its eight-minute duration that it's worth listening to all the way through. Ditto "Dubman Dub It," which adds a fat-bottomed thrust to the new age tech house that rules dance floors these days, from the Pacific Northwest to Paris. I'm most partial to "Chickadee" and its pseudo-dubstep thwap, channeling the elliptical dubstep-techno fusions of 2009 (hello again Peverelist) instead of the ongoing womp-obsessed dubstep revival. Closer "Chocolate" outdoes everything else at nearly 13 minutes long, ambling into dubbed-out oblivion as the delay and echo effects only get stronger.

Rrose & Polygonia - Dermatology [EAUX]

Polygonia is one of the best new(er) techno producers around. Her style is psychedelic, textural and plays spatial tricks on the brain, much like Rrose, whom she credits with getting her into techno in the first place. This collaboration must be as much of a dream come true for her as it is for fans of weirdo techno, and here the two producers merge into an uncanny whole, like strands of nucleotides wrapping around each other into a double helix.

Rrose and Polygonia's techno is elemental and forceful, but also atmospheric. It's deceptively experimental in spite of its rhythmic ease. The duo mold granular synthesis into drums and basslines, rather than using typical preset sounds, which only adds to the artificial-organic feel of the record. "Stretcher" grows and recedes like a diaphragm, its textures volatile and threatening, while "Diastole" sounds like red blood cells rushing through the arteries—until it doesn't, ballooning into a breakdown and synth motif that could rock Time Warp festival. 

Crespi Drum Syndicate - Beats [Isla]

The first release from Crespi Drum Syndicate is called Beats, but I think that Drums would be a better title. Because that's what you get here: drums. Live, sampled, played hand against skin, with drumsticks, or generated from a synth. Crespi is a collaboration between Jonny From Space and Pablo Arrangoiz, the latter a sort of mad professor figure in the Miami Scene with approximately 72 aliases (the most well-known being El Gusano, which I reviewed last year). These tracks veer from heady percussive workouts ("Broken Bread") to synth-driven soundscapes that sound like eerie alien rituals ("Espiritus del Norte") to leftfield broken techno that wouldn't be out of place on Hessle Audio ("Bruxula"). The rhythms alternate between rambunctious and dreamy, taking inspiration from across the world and across eras—a bit of dancehall here, a bit of Latin club there, some of the freakiest Krautrock from the early '70s sprinkled in. If nothing else, Beats gets across the sheer power of percussion. Sometimes you don't need anything else.

Gi Gi - Dreamliner [Quiet Time]

More trip-hop. I've read over and over that shoegaze is the internet genre of the last couple years, but I'm not so sure. Some artists, like a.s.o., add a modern sheen to the fundamentals of the genre, while a wave of downtempo and ambient producers are putting a more ethereal spin on it. Enter Dreamliner, the newest record from underrated Texas producer Gi Gi. This trip-hop is wispy and ethereal, almost like your hand would just pass through if you tried to touch it. On tracks like "Plume," washes of comforting and indistinct sound are designed to trigger pleasant memories, like a less creepy Boards Of Canada. With "Omnibus," the drums hit with a bassy thud cushioned by a high-pass filter. It's all very '90s—there's a bit of Autechre's Amber too—but the sound is hi-def and modern, with a sense of stillness in motion that's harder to achieve than you think.

Clinic Stars - Only Hinting [Kranky]

Clinic Stars is a new signing on Kranky, part of the legendary label's increasing focus on dream pop. Let's be clear: they sound familiar. I can't pretend that the leisurely strummed guitars, with nylon strings reverberating across the stereo spectrum, haven't been done on a hundred records before. Or that the vocals, which sound like they're coming behind a tear-stained tapestry, aren't a little close to Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine. But I also can't deny that the Detroit band shreds, particularly in the songwriting department. This music unfolds like one long sigh, except for when it explodes (in slow motion, of course) into post-rock reveries that reach for the stars instead of staring down at the ground.

Maral - Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) [PTP]

It feels cliché to say, but: Maral's work is punk through-and-through. (Come on—she's worked with Crass's Penny Rimbaud.) There's a jagged, sawn-off feel to her textures, and her samples sound like they came from records rubbed raw with sand-paper. That approach even comes out in the sequencing on records like Mahur Club, where bass drops go off like lightning strikes and the direction changes like a derailing train. Patience (​ص​ب​ر​) is a jam-packed EP on the equally iconoclastic PTP label that takes this fragmentary approach even further. This record cuts a pathway through Maral's back catalogue, including extending the 2013 snippet "patience"—about a wrenching unrequited love—into an even more unpredictable beast that stumbles into a zone of light, like an accidental epiphany during a crisis. And the crushing “Retrofit” mixes a sort of deadpan hip-hop bravado from YATTA with an obstacle course of distorted kick drums.

The overall theme of Patience is incorporating Iranian samples and styles, and Maral brings them in with expected force. If you've ever seen her live, you'll know that she can get heavy, and the triptych at the heart of the EP—"Mashhad Hardcore," "Mumble Punk" and "Lorestan Punk"—is as ugly as a fit of rage, meant to channel the frustration of "how Iran is treated within the western imperialist hold on the world," and how the people of Iran particularly are scapegoated or forced to suffer as pawns of an international game. On this EP, lovelorn loss and geopolitical injustice jostle for attention—both trigger their own kind of intense emotional reactions—in a scorching 11 minutes that would probably scare people back in 1978 if it were pressed on some long-lost acetate.

Ekoplekz - Dirkbox [Selvamancer]

Bristol's Nick Edwards is one of those guys who's been doing his thing—scuzzy splashes of corrosive synths shaped into abstract forms through dub techniques—for years without caring much if anyone noticed. Still, he had a moment in the sun about a decade ago, racking up releases on labels like Planet Mu, Further Records and Punch Drunk, before receding into a smokescreen of limited or digital-only releases. Dirkbox, which lands on Spanish imprint Selvamancer, is admittedly the first new music of his I've heard since before the pandemic, but it sounds like he spent that time in tape-and-CD-R-land making his music more approachable. Like the excellent Legowelt and Gesloten Cirkel records it follows, Dirkbox is gleefully naughty, with digidub and broken beat patterns that splatter acrid synth textures all over the place. It’s a disgusting food fight you find yourself pulled into for the sake of getting messy, and maybe venting some of your more unsavoury feelings.