Claro Intelecto - Second Blood EP (Delsin)

After nine years of putting out consistently high quality house and techno variations, new material from Claro Intelecto gets pretty much brought on sight nowadays, so I jumped on this three tracker for Delsin last time I was in the shop. Whilst Mark Stewart's earliest work was heavily indebted to Detroit and Sheffield, with a few influences from the burgeoning bass music scene, Second Blood sees him encorporating aspects of Demdike Stare's skeletal drone compositions and a fair dose of Deepchord's reverb-heavy echochamber work. Overdriving the high end and layering up ridiculous amounts of reverb, Stewart channels a goodly amount of Rod Modell's dreamy aesthetic, coating everything in fine-grained dust and echo that blur solid shapes. Adding to the oneiric feel is the distinct tempo drop - Second Blood and Heart both see Stewart slowing to 90bpm despite retaining a house/ techno blueprint for the beats - which adds to the floaty, disconnected feeling.
Final track Voyeurism raises the tempo back to 120bpm, and throws in a more solid palette of claps and percussion to drive things forward, but retains the scuffed and blurry aesthetic, building through three false climaxes before introducing a skronky acid line that's still brillinatly minimal. With a full-length album due on Delsin later this year, there's further reason to be keeping eyes on Claro Intelecto and his unique brand of dub. Awesome stuff.