- Around the time of Len Leise's debut EP for International Feel, a story circulated that the project was yet another pseudonym for label head Mark Barrott. There may be no photographic evidence to prove otherwise—the only picture of Leise I've come across is of a man strolling, a tree branch obscuring his face. In terms of sound and playfulness, though, Leise is definitely his own man. He steps out on his own self-titled label for his first full-length, the six-track Ing.
While the album's titles suggest present tense, the sound is decidedly set a few decades in the past. Thankfully, Leise has the production chops to evoke Sly & Robbie during their Taxi Records heyday while also tweaking things just enough to make it pop and snap in the here and now. The album begins with "Pretending," whose slow, spacey pulse sets it just at the edge of new age, though it slowly gathers steam. "Rocking" is full of drums and squelchy guitar-synths, all of it dubbed and flanged like an early Mad Professor track.
That playful dub sensibility continues on "Stepping," where a croaking voice gets shot up to a UFO and then beamed back to Earth, with Leise doing his best Dennis Bovell impersonation. A similar feeling of zero-gravity opens "Stopping," though here Leise pairs it to a disco thump and tribal growl. "Swimming" slows the pace a bit, the dubby mischievousness reminiscent of early explorations from The Orb. Ing may not occupy the same sort of sublime space that Music For Forests did, but its giddy dubs show Leise has room to grow.
Tracklist01. Pretending
02. Swimming
03. Rocking
04. Stopping
05. Wandering
06. Stepping