Dense & Pica - Crispy Duck

I can't say the title's really doing it for me, but Hot Flush's latest 12" from the anonymous duo Dense & Pica is some quality prime-time techno that nods to Berghain and Tresor as much as to the Motor City, and occupies similar ground to some of Redshape's old school throwbacks. Their whole deal of hand-stamped, limited run vinyl is a nice touch - working the anonymous angle without getting into some over-worked game of Clue about it- as well as giving their records a nice sense of individuality. 31's unstable house riff is killing for me right now.

Recondite - DRGN / Wist 365 (Hot Flush, Out Now)

Recondite - DRGN / Wist 365 (Hot Flush, Out Now)

I didn't get a chance to give this props before its release, but Recondite's work continues to impress me. It's not massively genre-breaking stuff that he puts out, but there's something about the his delicately vintage take on techno that appeals strongly to me - not the raw, aggressive vintage of old acid house, but the soft, warmly produced sound of classic analogue kit. This neat little two parter doesn't complicate matters with wild drum patterning or big drops, but sets up simple loopy riffs and lets it all unfold. On one side, DRGN drops a wickedly vibrating bassline, building up a slow-burning filter shift backed by taught percussion to make for a solid techno tune - something like Redshape, taken down a notch or two. For me, the flipside's where it's at, cooking a couple of simple analogue key riffs for nine minutes, shifting the decay or the pitch every now and then to switch up a little. Recondite really makes the most of a minimal palette, making every aspect count, and when the clap starts up at the four minute mark, Wist 365 translates the slow-burning energy into a quality house groove. It's not a peak-time destroyer or a definitive anthem of any sort, that's for sure, but I'm in love with the rolling pace and rich sound that's going on here, so listen out for it on the radio show.

Shelter Point - Forever Now (Hot Flush 22nd August)

Shelter Point - Forever Now (Hot Flush 22nd August)

Shelter Point's debut EP for Hot Flush marks a distinct evolution for the primarily dancefloor label; incorporating elements of hypnagogic pop, found sounds, shoegaze and lo-fi, it's a brilliantly skronky mess of melancholic and euphoric sounds channeled into four quality tunes. Certainly, Forever Now shares DNA with other Hot Flush acts - Mount Kimbie most obviously, though there's elements of George Fitzgerald's r'n'b stylings in there - but Shelter Point's sound is a good a two steps to the left of anything else we've seen from Scuba's baby. The two piece act manage to work with a spectacularly diverse sound palette of analogue synthesis, upright pianos, spectral effects and some unique vocals that will undoubtedly garner James Blake comparisons, despite having a great deal more in common with Burial.

Much like Burial, Shelter Point approach dance music with a heavy focus on deconstruction, reconfiguring the building blocks of dance music from the ground up; blurring the synth lines and drawing out the vocals to leave the melodies feeling strained, distant and ineffable. The percussion feels like a vague sketch of a familiar shapes, as hi-hats and claves are reduced to mere frequency spikes, shorn of their decay, whilst the staple 909 snare becomes a broken-glass shatter, or the harsh metallic strike of Zippo. Forever For Now exhibits this best, with brittle yet forceful drums stabbing up through the mix, harshly punctuating the isolation tank synths. In the most literal sense, Shelter Point's aesthetic is "post" dance music - the sounds from after the dance, the fuzzy third-hand memory of bright lights and big beats, drawn from background hum of the city. Occasionally this drags a little, and the 2nd half of the EP is nowhere near as strong as the first, with both Hold on Me and Sleep Easy indulging in excessive chopped and screwed dynamics that detract from their beautifully melancholic feel. That said, the formers detuned vocal snippets are beautifully executed, and hint at further greatness. Coupled with two really strong tracks in Braille and Forever For Now, this is an exciting debut from an act we'll definitely be watching.

Scuba - The Hope (Recondite mix)

Scuba - The Hope (Recondite mix) - 23/07 Hotflush

Hot Flush's latest release is another pretty solid Scuba remix outing, with Recondite offering up two interpretations of The Hope, the deliriously ravey cut from February this year. Rather than upping the ante, Recondite strips away the majority of Scuba's original track, retaining only the distorted voice, and filtering down the bass to a warm, resonant low end. Whilst the two reworkings are intended to conjure different time periods, named Nocturnal Car Ride and Morning Promise respectively, they're fairly similar aesthetically and channel a smoked out, deep-house vibe. Admittedly, the former focusses slightly more on the bass and the lower end, whilst the latter stretches the hi-end synths into ambient/ Kraut waves, whilst winding the percussion down to a more minimal groove.
I'm definitely more enamoured with the Nocturnal cut, but both tracks are solid DJ tools with great potential and rich sounds that will get a few good outings.

Guy Andrews - The Wait (Hotflush Records, 28 May)

Guy Andrews - The Wait (Hotflush Records, 28 May)

Perrenial Shallowrave favourite Guy Andrews follows up his acclaimed 12" for Hemlock with a dark dancefloor killer for Hot Flush, undoubtedly one of our favourite labels. Whilst we've had nothing but good things to say about Andrews' post-rock/ambient output, it definitely feels that he's hitting his stride as a producer with his recent dancefloor 12"s - Iambic's focus on soundscapes, texture and the wall of noise limited the potential for narrative and drive. The transition to more focussed and beat-driven productions sees Andrews using his readily-established talent for composition and rhythm to create powerful bass music hybrids. Mixing snippets of acid basslines, complex percussion and warm, reverb-heavy synth lines, The Wait is one of those brilliantly wtf?-inducing tracks that deserves to be absolutely massive, whilst Hands in Mine continually fakes out the listener, mixing Mount Kimbie-esque walls of noise and Baile funk percussion before dropping into something that sounds a bit Kode9's Too Far Gone, a bit like Music era Talking Heads and a lot like what James Blake wishes he was making.

Andrews work sits nicely alongside other releases from Hot Flush and Hemlock, mixing many of the elements that both labels helped to build. However, unlike some of his labelmates, Andrews never sounds like a techno producer incorporating R'n'B elements, or a dubstep producer who's listened to too many Ostgut records; like Shades/Textures before it, The Wait feels like someone approaching dance music with a completely blank slate, incorporating whatever elements appeal to them, rather than attempting to emulate existing artists. His mixes (see below) clearly demonstrate a pretty solid knowledge of current dance music, yet The Wait feels brilliantly naive and unencumbered in both production and composition. Awesome work.
http://soundcloud.com/guyandrews

Scuba - Personality

I'm not as immediately sold on this record as I was by Triangulation, but there's a great deal of depth here, and it definitely rewards repeat listening. Scuba continues to be awesome.

Sigha - Abstractions I-IV

Sigha - Abstractions I-IV (Hot Flush, 20 Feb)

Awww yeah. Sigha's new 12" for Hot Flush expands his range even further and confirms him as one of the most consistently interesting producers of modern electronica, blending industrial, drone and techno to brilliant effect. Whilst previous EPs have been a solid blend of techno and dubstep, with one more surreal number tacked on, Abstractions is firmly centred around Sigha's more disturbing machinations, with only How To Disappear working a conventional techno groove. Opener Something in Between Us is a beatless, glacial drone sketch, channeling a fair dose of Eno or Ulrich Schnauss and building up a wall of ambience that peters out far too soon for my liking. Working with a similarly frosted aesthetic, Sigha continues with the Autechre-esque Where I Come To Forget, which delivers a pallete of blips and snarls that continually threatens to morph into breakbeats, but resolutely fails to ever kick off. The absence of notable breaks and drops will doubtless infuriate, but the cold, mechanistic feel that permeates the record translates beautifully to repetitive, minimal structures.

As the title suggests, Abstractions appears to composed of extracts from live jams, with more attention given to sculpting sounds than to crafting DJ tools, however How To Disappear's eventual four-to-the-floor rhythm makes for great dark techno. With its gasping reverb and three-note melody, it sits somewhere between Sleeparchive and Regis and begs to be given a workout on full soundsystem. Closing off the record is Drown, and appropriately aquatic, polyrhythmic dub-techno number that feels similar to the Black Dog's more recent industrial experiments, albeit without their gift for a strong technoid narrative. Whilst the overall minimalism and lack of drive may render the EP less accessible to some, Sigha's ear for sound and dynamic continues to improve, and it's an enjoyable challenge to DJ with.

Scuba - Adrenalin

Scuba - Adrenalin (Hot Flush, 26th September)

It's no secret that Shallowrave has a bit of a thing for Scuba - as well as keeping the truly epic Hotflush record label turning out next-big-thing after next-big-thing, Paul Rose's role in bringing together the globe's different strands of bass music is second only to that of Kode9, and frankly, Aesaunic is a better single work than anything Goodman's managed. Seriously.

His latest offering, a 3-track EP on Hot Flush, once again utterly nails it; welding the broken glamour of UK garage onto a framework of purist Detroit beats and widescreen synths, it's a rich, euphoric piece of work that channels all the best bits of dub , R'n'b, techno and hip-hop into a seething dancefloor mess. Casting aside Scuba's previous propensity for cloying bass and Berghain-inflected doominess, Adrenalin occupies a weird mid-ground between Joy O and Carl Craig, with it's crisp, floaty synths, vocal samples and garagey bassline sneaking along in the background. It's dead on the money and sets the tone for two more monsters. In contrast, Never rips wholesale from the best of Afrika Bambaata, layering up that boom-bap with some gloriously rich synth lines and building a brilliantly twisted take on London garage. Closing the record, Everywhere sets up a beautiful piano riff that ultimately ends up a bit of a let down when the drums and vocal sample comes in and it gets all Prince. It's by no means a bad track, but the B-side just cries out for a dark and mangled dub, rather than a third dose of 808-driven uber-house. Good work from Scuba, and definitely his most dancefloor-centred to date.

Joy O - Jels / Wade In

Joy O - Jels / Wade In (Hot Flush) - 10/03

Definitely the most ballsy Joy Orbison record to date; despite the glossed-to-fuck synths he's made his trademark, the 303 bassline rubber-ducking it's way through Jels is far harder than anything from his previous house / r'n'b / step variants, and combined with beefy kicks and big booming claps, makes for a seriously jacking peice of work. Of course, there's the obligatory vocal dropped into the mix - a detuned, mournful cry of "torn" cutting through, but this one's played a lot straighter than other Orbison tracks, basing itself around classic house grooves. Wade In is similarly grounded in proper house, building from solid 303 percussion and a definite kick-clap structure, but shuffling the rimshots and cowbells to weirdly accentuated positions. The filtering, loopy vox is still garagey as fuck, as is the surreally strung-out breakdown, but the piano riff worming it's way through the drop is pure Chi-town stuff. Without retreating into simplistic formulae and done-to-death styles, UK bass music is circling back a degree or so, dragging with it all the new flavours and styles acquired along the way; the artist formally known as Orbison might just turn it all into house music again....

"Them pigeonholes were never nothing to hold me"

George Fitzgerald - Don't You / SCB Remix

George Fitzgerald - Don't You / SCB Remix (Hot Flush Records)
George Fitzgerald, whose debut EP, The Let Down, neatly tied together the dominant strains of garage, bass, house and R'n'B that were big at the time, returns to Hot Flush with another cut of fractured vocals, broken beats and lush synths. To some extent, it's more of the same; there's mournful detuned vox that warp in and around the melody, skittery half-step percussion and rich synths all bundled up in warm atmospherics. Undoubtedly, this is going to get rinsed to death, especially with Scuba, the man who's A&R skills have launched Joy Orbison, Mount Kimbie and Sigha backing it, and providing a remix on the flip. But this is no monster anthem; it's the moody, richly textured version of the garage-not-garage thing that Kavsrave, J.O. and the rest are punting at the moment. Whether or not there's space in the marketplace for more of the same remains to be seen, but Fitzgerald has his own charm and energy that makes him worth looking out for. Hell, even the vocals have their own place, unlike a few too many of Orbison's tracks.
For me, though, the B-side is where it's at - Paul Rose (Scuba), under his SCB moniker careful extracts the essentials of the original and processes them into the kind of Berlin Boom-Tish that he's been espousing lately. Honestly, it's not the best thing he's done under either moniker, but nailing the synthy, purple wow-inflected garage-isms of the original onto a solid technoid template makes for a genre-smashing synthesis. Nice work.

George Fitzgerald - The Let Down

Awesome dubstep-not-dubstep business from Hot Flush 2 with this debut 12" from George Fitzgerald, combining lurching garage-esque percussion with fractured, mournful vocals and lush synths. In the wake of Joy Orbison's tectonic impact, Fitzgerald will doubtless be tagged as part of some "future-garage renaissance", but there's also heavy aspects of Burial in the twisted vocals and deconstructed approach to percussion. Equally, the skittering melodies of Weakness are as haunted by Theo Parrish and Basic Channel as they are by UK urban music, and both sides of the 12" absorb a richness of influences that prevents them from being consigned to any scene or genre. That said, a forthcoming release on Orbison's Doldrums label does solidify the idea of scene or sound waiting to break. For now, this comes highly reccomended for it's brittle-yet-polished production, depth of influence and delicate headspaces. Top 12". The Let Down by George FitzGerald

Virus Syndicate are still not very nice people

and have made this video about drugs.

Definitely one of their sickest tunes to date, backed by buzz-saw grime productions from Benga.

The cultural melting pot proceeds to bubble, with Virus now the only UK acts to appear on a US Dubstep compilation, with Xzibit, Snoop Dogg and Eve. With Glasgow spitting out Reggae MCs like Soom T, genre's become utterly detached from location. We transcend cities and physical boundaries, and the length of time between a scene emerging and it's sound becoming a part of the ever-evolving sphere of influence is rapidly shortening. We will soon share ideas upon thinking them.
Sigha - Rawww EP [HFT010] by Hotflush
Also digging the brand new Hot Flush stuff from Sigha. I actually know very little about Sigha, but Hot Flush has become a solid gold stamp of approval in my mind - Mount Kimbie's weird and wonderful take on UK electronic is sheer beauty, the new Scuba EP kicked the shit out of the modern dubstep scene, and this forthcoming EP from Sigha looks awesome. Deep, dark, post-Basic Channel techno. It's also twelve minutes long, for maximum k-hole devastation. Like all good minimal, it seems blindingly repetitive and reductionist, but unfolds a complex sonic head-fuck.

I'll post a full track closer to the release date.