- To its credit, London's Diffrent imprint is indeed different than your regular drum & bass label. But not too different. The upstart oufit has a keen ear for conventional drum & bass built with intricate sound design made to capture the attention without sacrificing visceral impact. Their 13th release comes from Bristol producer Jekyll, and is a perfect example of how they differ from the proverbial pack.
"Drainpipe," at first glance, is pretty standard—it's got the basic percussive skeleton and once the bass drops, some blistering lines of LFO tumble every which way. But Jekyll's work is all about texture: the drums are hollow and refined, as though you can outline the shape of their smooth cold metal every time they hit, and that gurgling bassline moves with the queasy, quick frame rate feel of modern 3D effects. (Try to follow it as it zig-zags across the stereo spectrum without getting nauseous.) There's something unusually natural and fluid about Jekyll's tracks, and a bevy of implacable little sounds lurking in the off-beats completes the package, a trait emphasized in flipside "Blabbermouth." Here, fragments of the drum track seem to crumble into shards of twisted metal, bursting into flames before re-assembling themselves. "Blabbermouth" is a bit like watching someone undo the heavily timestretched and warped sampling of early jungle in realtime, reverse engineering at its most thrilling. Artists like Rockwell have already set the bar high, but Jekyll and Diffrent show that there's room for plenty more in the realm of experimental but powerful drum & bass.
Tracklist A Drainpipe
B Blabbermouth