Pangaea - Inna Daze / Won't Hurt

Pangaea - Inna Daze / Won't Hurt (28.02.11)
Hessle's 17th release sees co-boss Pangaea dropping a couple of deep house variations, dropping down from his standard garagey 140 to a more restrained 130bpm tempo. With distant wails, slow-attacking synths and skittery percussion, Inna Daze echos the same sparse atmospherics of Burial or 2562, revelling in the spaciousness of the production, before a fractured R'n'B vocal and a warm bass melody emerge from the emptiness. It's not exactly big room material, and lacking a solid foundation, it achieves the kind of slow-groove, dubbed out feel that we love. Though the construction's obviously heavily indebted to UK urban music styles, the production values are undeniably tinged with the warped and skewed sonic ideology of Moodymann and Theo Parrish, as well as modern head music like shoegaze and ambient, placing all the best bits of the production in weirdly inaccessible places. Won't Hurt, whilst a little faster, and charged with a sickeningly gigantic bassline, is possibly even more leftfield. The vintage string melody, plucked straight from a matinee classic, gets reversed, skewed and offset until it lapses into complete abstraction and withers into the distance, allowing the beasting garage riddims to return in full effect. Pangaea's Sunset Yellow was probably as important a record as Hyph Mngo (dropping within weeks of each other), but ended up massively overshadowed by Orbison's oooh-wa-ooh-ooh monster - this one aught to stand on it's own as a contemporary bass classic.
Inna Daze by pangaea