

It's hard to know where we're headed for much of the seven-minute "Reanimator." The drums twitch and thud uneasily, shuffling between long pauses and moments of 16th-note overload. The synths are sparse and swirling; the closest thing to a melody comes from the frayed toms lurking in the midrange. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a UK-rooted producer, the low-end eventually brings things into line, starting as a dubstep-like bassbin shudder and swelling until a detuned drone threatens to swamp the mix.
"Tensegrity" is somehow both more straightforward and trickier to pin down. Forming out of a cloud of vague synth work, its gaunt, semitonal bassline and clattery rimshots suggest grime. But the beat never clarifies, stumbling over a triplet obstacle every couple of bars. Just as it's gaining momentum, uneven synth spurts send it scattering back into confusion, before Spatial gathers everything together for the climax. Emergence #2 flirts with incoherence, but doesn't succumb to it.
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Published /
Mon / 14 Mar 2016 -
Words /
Angus Finlayson -
Tracklist /
A Reanimator
B Tensegrity
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