Tiga – Bugatti
The Ibiza season is jogging its performance-enhanced way out of the blocks, and already various tracks are being anointed as this year’s defining anthem. Making strong cases are Oliver $’s soulful house groove Pushing On, Gerd’s atmospheric Still Believe and Ten Walls’ Walking with Elephants (or Blandarine Girl, as I like to call it, for its shameless retread of a Booka Shade classic).
When I was on the White Isle recently, however, it was this new Tiga joint that really jumped out at me. It’s so rare to have a really witty vocal in a mainstream dance track, but Bugatti’s single line is camp, preening and an irresistible earworm. Returning to the brittle and bracing electroclash that he helped define in the early 00s, his monotone vocals simultaneously satirise the frequent banality of dance culture and revel in it; the listener, meanwhile, can scoff at the aspirational Eurotrash character in the track and strut around the pool in £300 Persol sunnies.
Guy Gerber and Diddy – My Heart
Currently out in Ibiza is deep house producer and DJ Guy Gerber, who has downscaled from Pacha last year to a beachside bar this year for his new series Rumors – but hopefully something more low key will leave more space for his remarkable collaboration album with P Diddy, 1111, to get noticed.
On paper, it sounds like a folly. It’s 90 minutes long, is coming out for free, and Diddy apparently wanted it to be called Ketamine. Gerber certainly has Ibiza pedigree, hanging in the booth with Ricardo Villalobos and making Jack U with Felix Da Housecat, but by his own admission is easily distracted: he once bailed on a series of island recording sessions with Stuart Price because he went out clubbing for an entire week.
But while it’s bloated and has stretches of both inertia and tame funky house, the album is frequently brilliant. Broken Windows is a high-grade version of current underground darling Galcher Lustwerk, with its constantly driving deep groove and intense patter; blissed disco track Angels features beautiful Chromatics-like guitar; My Heart, previewed below, has a finely wrought arrangement with a butch flow tracking through it. Gerber submits his voice to all kinds of effects, and it’s revelatory: we have Diddy the opiated Weeknd/Drake nihilist, Diddy the queenly seductress, Diddy the pitched-down Houston hood. On the highlight, a 10-minute track called Floating Messiah, he’s ambient crooner, drawling preacher, and briefly and strikingly, plain unadorned Diddy. 1111 is a curio, yes, but one that shows the power of daring, exploratory craft being thrown into the relatively cheesy world of deep house.
Last Japan – Ride With Us
It’s a brilliant time for instrumental grime, with a competitive climate of oneupmanship, nurturers such as London’s Boxed night, and a generation of producers who reckon that grime is still the best space to create arrhythmic and truly experimental productions.
Highlights this year have been the likes of Rabit’s Red Candles, Mr Mitch’s staggeringly mournful The Room Where I Belong EP, and the forthcoming LP from Slackk, which feels like a rave where everything is falling apart in reverse. Last Japan has made a valuable contribution too, with a debut mixtape that’s full of the same cartoonish orientalisms that characterised Jammer’s generation, but also updated for the next generation.
Artificial, chirpy gamelan and flutes are flitting spots of colour in a gunmetal landscape, provoking bleak and harried verses from Trim on the lead track. Goldeneye is another highlight, a deeply unstable, lurching sound, but at the other end the scale there’s a lovely, whirring R&B ballad in Eclipse. Plenty of valuable source material for introspective MCs.
Dario Zenker – Banded
This track is a reminder that you needn’t be clean and pared back to be minimalist, nor that you need to be quantised to be danceable. Indeed, it’s the very threat of incoherence that creates the funk in this brutally brilliant piece of techno.
Zenker is a Munich producer whose Ilian Tape label, with his brother Marco, is much-adored by techno fans looking for rough edges; this release ppears on The Trilogy Tapes from the UK’s Will Bankhead, who has built one of the country’s most reliable outlets for gruff, even recalcitrant dance tracks that nevertheless work their way into your legs.
Banded is a masterclass in simplicity: a drum pattern reverberates, while a single-note top line lets its reverb carry it away, leading to a rhythmic dissonance. This is a track to wrestle with, to really earn your right to dance to.
Holly Herndon – Body Sound
On the other hand, it’s quite impossible to dance to is this new one-off track from Holly Herndon – and yet it somehow more accurately reflects dance culture than all of the above. Herndon is an electronic musician from California whose work is fixated on the body – with all its inhalations and other strange demands.
Here, she collaborates with choreographer Cuauhtemoc Peranda, recording the sound of his movements before reordering, amplifying and tweaking them into an abstracted but tantalisingly rhythmic piece of sound: a melodic squelch of skin on floor becomes a drum pattern, a dragged sole like a zipper opening up the track.
Permit me a moment of whimsy here, while I argue that this feels like a field recording of a single body dancing in a club. Our feet rarely move with gym-class order, but in a snaking motion that allows the upper body to actually dance; our breathing isn’t steady, but can come in bursts. And all the while, as well as being in an “I love you man” communal atmosphere, we’re tuned to an internal world of consciousness and sound.
Herndon has made a piece that reminds us of the reality of the body in motion, in all its impetuousness, imperfection, loneliness and vitality – another standout work from a producer whose previous album was called, appropriately, Movement.
