- If you hit up Chicago-based sometime radio jock Area's Tangled In on Beatport, you'll see that they class it under dubstep. Various other websites go for tech house, minimal, or dub techno, with Discogs' even adding acid house to the mix. This wild variation illustrates just how far the title track and its rework stray outside current genre boundaries. Its caliginous aesthetic and sorta-4/4 probably has more in common ambience-wise with dub techno than it does with anything else, but then again there's not really that much dubby delay-effected synthwork. Let's move on, shall we, and just say that this much individuality combined with the kind of skin-crawling skankiness that swung Steadfast label owner Brendon Moeller's style nicely earlier this year under their collaborative Lightness project makes for one of the most powerful, interesting and sickest couple of tracks I've heard for a while.
That's not to gloss over his re-work of "Dirt," which is a quality piece of claustrophobic heaviness, constructed nicely of chopping white noise and a single dense chord pulsating. It was originally released about a year ago as a digital add-on to Echologist's Snow Blower EP, and I suspect that it was perhaps a marketing decision to add it here. That's because the balance between expected and experimental would probably give it wider appeal than the other two. But the repetitive weirdness of the Chinese female vocalist, the drum tracks which have two different types of seizures, the pure density of the two versions of "Tangled In" make them two significantly more unique artifacts, guaranteed to create a special mood in a club.
Tracklist A1 Area with Hum Kathy - Tangled In
A2 Area with Hum Kathy - Tangled In / Bonus Level
B1 Echologist - Dirt (Area Elevation)
B2 Area with Hum Kathy - Tangled In Acapella