- There's comfy deep and then there's freaky deep. We're most familiar with the former, especially these days: an augmented chord or two, a sensual shuffle and a vocal sample generally suffice to sketch the outline. When we descend into the nether regions, though, shit gets weird: the pressure crushes in from every angle, and the creatures that drift past are so alien, they might as well be from outer space. That's the realm that Deepblak founder Aybee (Oakland's Armon Bazile, aka Prof. Delacroix, o1o, Orion 70, et al) maps on his Astral Metronome EP. (Never mind what the title says. It stands to reason that an Afrofuturist like Bazile understands that the extreme deep is the mirror image of the outer limits.)
"No Fiction" rides a punchy drum machine rhythm with claps so sharp they could split logs, but in every other way, it's essentially an ambient track, with a muted lead bubbling up through swirling, indistinct chords. The track's structure doesn't really lead anywhere, but it needn't; it's enough to bob in place, marveling at the way heavy tape compression squashes the sounds into amorphous shapes. "Ether" is more straightforward, with dubby chords and a slinky drum pattern cruising on auto-pilot. It's less gripping, but it still has the potential to hypnotize, given the appropriate context. "Kommands," on the other hand, sends Aybee's bathysphere deep into uncharted waters to discover a species approximating slow-motion UK funky. Hard, syncopated toms bash against a Morse code of a bassline, but they're no match for the inky drones that swell up and swallow the track whole, until all that's left is a cloud of debris.
Tracklist A1 No Fiction
A2 Ether
B Kommands