For the first release on the shadowy SSSSS label, Untold's 2009 cut "Anaconda" gets reworked in the style of tribal guarachero, an emergent Mexican subgenre that fuses woozily syncopated folk percussion with stomping electronic kicks and claps. The label is keeping mum as to the remixer's identity, and in a sense, it hardly makes a difference, because it's a fair bet that you've never heard anything quite like this before.
The rhythm is unusually hard to parse, at first. It drives forward over a straight, 4/4 kick drum at 130 BPM, but rushing conga patterns lend a profoundly offbeat sensibility, and a much slower one. (In fact, I wasn't even sure that it was a straight 4/4 kick until I dropped the track into Ableton and could see how the beats line up.) It's rare, in dance music, to have top-line polyrhythms that tug so powerfully against the regular beat. The groove stumbles forward, driven and deranged, gradually folding in strands of the original's distinctive, bleepy melody. But it's teased in and out, extending guarachero's strange lulls and rushes to the stop-start structure of the track as a whole. It's as thrilling as it is baffling.
The flip features "Pulso," by the 24-year-old Austin, Texas producer Dubbel Dutch. Between the title and that telltale bass whoomp, it sounds like an homage to Musical Mob's grime classic "Pulse X," although he also seems to have picked up an unusually elastic sense of timekeeping from his beat-making compadres across the border. Bells and sampled hand percussion flutter nervously against rigid kicks, and a slippery three-against-four groove shifts incessantly from side to side, alternately lumbering and shimmying.
Tracklist: Untold / Dubbel Dutch - Anaconda Refix / Pulso
A Untold - Anaconda (Tribal Guarachero Refix)
B Dubbel Dutch - Pulso
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