- The Berlin producer makes a globally-minded club EP with an exacting ear for rhythm and pacing.
- The music on Mexico City label Infinite Machine, though it welcomes an international roster, seems unmistakably inspired by the imprint's environs. Across the label's 2021 compilation celebrating its milestone tenth year, smoldering cumbía mists over, experimental reggaeton erupts with its jagged, metallic edges and seismic sounds emulating pre-Columbian instruments pay homage to Mexico's indigenous roots. This diverse tapestry of ancestral sounds is folded into a sleek, hyper-modern post-dubstep package that the most adventurous club music du jour increasingly arrives in.
Berlin-based and hailing from Greece, Aroent doesn't have roots in Latin America, but his approach is aggressive, globally influenced and stylistically nebulous—three distinguishing traits of the Infinite Machine sound. On his debut record for the label, there are fragments of the diasporic rhythms the label is known for. The series of tropical, cascading hand drum rhythms on "Bobcat" are so buoyant and full of vim they might as well be leaping out of the speaker. Alien voices spill out of the track's crevices, like mutant dancehall MCs. "Rolling Oddities," on the other hand, garners momentum quietly with floating build-ups that crash land into scuffling, industrial dub passages. It's a slow-burner, a cut ideal for coloring the tenuous space in between a set's more explosive moments.
On the opener, "Say," slippery jungle collides with invigorating hand drum work at a particularly climactic moment. As the track winds down with a minute to spare, a nasally robotic voice instructs: "Say. My. Name." It's an impish touch that works well among the chaos of its already spectacular backdrop, but for club DJs whose attention spans often begin to wander after the three-minute mark, the vocals could have benefited from being worked earlier into the cut.
The track I return to most on the record is UK producer Ploy's edit of "Say," which speaks volumes about the label's keen eye for collaboration. Ploy transforms the opener into hefty hard drum, where laborious chants induce a state of meditation before bellowing sirens and whirring FX race each other before spinning out completely over the churning breaks below. It's a visionary remix, but it was Aroent's own singular knack for rhythm that provided such a powerful canvas for a rework like this.
Tracklist01. Say
02. Rolling Oddities
03. Bobcat
04. Say (Ploy's Skeletal Tool Remix)