Yally is a new project from Raime, designed to "explore Bass Futures indiscriminately.” The release inaugurates 12 x 12, a new series of one-sided releases from Boomkat Editions which will run over the next few months. We’ve asked twelve of our favourite artists (old and new) to contribute a release each to the series, the first installment featuring two scudding, killer steppers productions from Raime’s expert bladesmen, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, moonlighting here for the first time under a new alias on a rare away-day from Blackest Ever Black.
With a deep blue, skunked-out appeal right on the lip of late ’90s garage and early ’00s grime, London’s dankest duo compound, reflect and relieve the choking intensity of their recent 2nd album Tooth on the paranoid bruiser "Burnt" and its dread inversion "Sudo," making up their most ‘floor-dedicated session in more than five years of operations.
Toeing a line in the shadows between nervy but enervated, crushed and high, both cuts transpose the indelible impression of raving in a very different London landscape - pre-smoking ban and extreme financial bifurcation - with a patently shocking sense of economy and pressure that feels as vitally subversive as ever in the face of current capitalist realism.
Drawn from muscle memory of 2-step’s transition from champagne-soaked knees-up into paradoxically dense but spacious, stoned and impending sound designs, they form a sort of coming-to-terms with that epoch’s innovations in much the same way that their Moin releases firmly grappled with inextinguishable influence from the studio genius of Steve Albini and This Heat.
"Burnt" pins us by the windpipe with Stanley shanked hi-hats and ratty claps whilst cavernous, amorphous subs bruise flesh and dislocated yelps of pleasure/pain break thru rictus jaws. Think El-B or Hatcha echoing out of a graveyard slot on pirate radio circa ’03. With "Sudo" they pronate on the tightest, simmering halfstep; harnessing illicitly overloaded, vintage Air Max PSI allowance with shoulder rolling organ motif and nerve-tying ligature, perhaps imagining the pre-echoes of earliest Hyperdub or a Black Ops joint that even Jon E Cash was too shook to issue.
More information can be found here.
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