ALSO - EP1

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  • Electronic music, a world in which each producer can be king of his own castle, doesn't always place a huge amount of value on collaboration. But it's a skill that Laurie "Appleblim" Osborne has honed to a fine art. His decade-odd long discography mostly consists of collabs, with colleagues in Bristol's former-dubstep scene and beyond. Alec Storey got his turn back in 2010, when the pair issued a single on Aus. Back then Storey was producing turbulent hybrids as Al Tourettes; these days, as the Houndstooth-signed Second Storey, he's broadened and deepened his vision for IDM-techno. Fittingly, the pair's collaboration returns in a new guise, ALSO, and with a new home, R&S. Osborne's skill as a collaborator seems to be his ability to step back; often it feels like he's coaxing fresh ideas out of his workmate from a distance, allowing their own distinctive style to breathe. So it's no surprise that these tracks, with their dense structures, choppy rhythms and shiny metallic textures, sit very much in Storey's world. This isn't necessarily a good thing, particularly in "Sids Conundrum," which romps along at 140-odd BPM but feels hobbled by its fiddly cross-rhythms and relentless micro-detail. "Side Dive Prophets," too, is frustrating, its moments of shimmering prettiness obscured by the sheer density of the arrangement. Only in beefy electro number "Ashford Swaiths," whose radically lower tempo allows its swaggering groove to register through all the surface patterning, do the pair achieve lift-off.
  • Tracklist
      01. Sid’s Conundrum 02. Ashford Swaiths 03. Dive Prophets
RA