- Do you like deep house? What about St. Germain? Depending on your answer to that second question (assuming the first is "yes," anyway), then you're either going to reservedly enjoy Paxton Fettel's second EP for young British label Greta Cottage Workshop or you're going to fall head over heels in love with it. The young Danish producer is a bit like a CGI counterpart to Lawrence's realism, inflating instrument-led house tracks with luscious, swooning atmospherics.
"Magma" is a good barometer for Fettel's sound, holding a piano loop hostage and wrapping it up in layers of reverb, pulling closer and closer to a beat drop that doesn't come in until after two minutes. When it does, it's a gentle lope caressed by filtered horns, a theme repeated throughout the EP (see also the limp jazz house of "Fitchpork"). The title track finds the best balance of all, submerging the keys in a sumptuous cloud of echo and collapsing the reedy breath of the horns into the track's background. It feels neither jaunty nor jarring, and the track's metronomic clicking finds its own sharp strength without puncturing Fettel's delicate hot air balloon. The key here is the humid embrace of Fettel's ultra-warm production, and when he strips it away for the relatively straightforward piano-and-Rhodes jam of "Permafunk," it just feels like something's missing. His incorporation of live instruments and jazzy melodies still needs some work if it's going to avoid hackneyed motifs and cocktail lounge inertia (I did reference St. Germain, remember), but he's certainly got the production chops down.
TracklistA1 Permafunk
A2 Fitchpork
B1 Out Missing
B2 Magma