- Afrodiasporic club music with impeccable drum programming.
- You'd be forgiven for thinking Out Of Bounds couldn't be JSPORT's debut EP, judging from the opening salvo of "Zenon," a perfectly broken house tune with sleek chord stabs that slip and slide across the rhythm track. It would also be understandable to think you were in for a rock-solid house EP from the Atlanta producer, who runs the Morph Trax label with Leonce. But once "Gully Bop" rolls around, you realize you're in for something entirely different—an EP of inventive (and innovative) hard drum club music that collects ideas and rhythms from across the African diaspora and forms them into fierce new shapes.
"Gully Bop" is one of those genius combinations: soca meets UK bassline. The swung drums are lightweight but hit with real force, while the bassline whomps underneath offer something to grasp onto. The whole track centers around a dancehall vocal sample filtered until it sounds iridescent and shimmery, like we're listening to dance music from The Fifth Element. Things get more aggressive on "Hyper Drive," which is close to a Baltimore-baile funk hybrid wearing steel-toed boots. The drums go all-out on "Guillotine Drum," which has impossibly crisp drum sounds with just the right amount of reverb. The lithe stomping reminds me of a fighting scene in a modern wuxia film, but the basslines that burrow beneath keep it firmly tied to the dance floor.
There's an enormous amount of space in JSPORT's music, which makes it feel expansive and airy in spite of its largesse. There's room for every frequency of every drum to land and resolve into the background, and a wide berth for the low-end to luxuriate. This expansive quality defines EP highlight "Capoeira Drum." The complex rhythm pattern bounces and lunges like the titular dance, with little drum fills and accents filling in the nooks between the bigger drum sounds. There's barely any melody—just a grunt and a decaying chord in the background of the left channel—but there hardly needs to be. JSPORT's tuned percussion speaks for itself, a powerful, creative take on hard drum from a strong voice in an often underrepresented American dance music city.
Tracklist01. Zenon
02. Gully Bop
03. Capoeira Drum
04. Hyper Drive
05. Guillotine Drive