- The concept behind Style Upon Style's Bangers & Ash series is frankly inspired. For each instalment, an artist is asked to service two distinct crowds: smokers on the A-side, dancers on the B. These days, of course, there's plenty of overlap between the two, a point that, judging by his releases on Further and Opal Tapes, Best Available Technology is keenly aware of.
The A-side kicks things off in very fine style—though if this is smoking music then it's the soundtrack to a comically unpleasant whitey. "Bulldozer Rituals" and "Vulgar Geometry" sound like zombiefied relics from hip-hop's golden age, their dust-ravaged beats beset by helter-skelter synths and muffled drones respectively. "Venom, Pheromone, And Phosphorus" is dub for windowless basements, an utterly graceless beast whose periodic bursts of sub-bass border on oppressive. The appeal of these tracks is partly their stylised purposelessness; in contrast, the B-side is positively surgical in its precision. "Contrecoup"'s bassline swoops under sculpted sheet-noise, while "Tide Tunnels" is slower and weightier, its clipped groove evolving hypnotically over an oceanic dub techno chord. The latter's undulations of intensity make it almost peak-time fare, but a rather brutal mixdown—razor-sharp highs, liberal compression—doesn't work in its favour. Still, if we'd wanted prettiness, we wouldn't have asked BAT to the party, would we?
Tracklist A1 Bulldozer Rituals
A2 Vulgar Geometry
A3 Venom, Pheromone, and Phosphorus
B1 Contrecoup
B2 Tide Tunnels