Commercial dance music has a tendency towards sonic homogenization, but the past several months of club music highlight a different end of dancefloor culture. Grimy rhythmic corners, eccentric and delightfully amateur vocal performances, ruptured basslines, and non-quantized beat structures are all par for the course amidst the best club music of late Summer and early Fall.
MM & NKC continue over a decade’s worth of dancefloor precision on Grindhouse, fine-tuning hardcore riffs into a series of slick rap beats and drum tracks; Soda Plains takes a different tact on “Meet Me At Escados”, patiently working at higher tempos in a swelling emotional epic. Henzo and Sykors, starting from divergent geographical and stylistic reference points, both star at low-end contortions, the former in the bassline-extended vein and the latter in the seam of Brasília’s thriving MTG scene. Meanwhile, BADSISTA and Sviej Badlalele offer up pure dancefloor forms that should keep DJs going for months.
Convention is thrown to the wind on releases from Ziúr, secat and ODAE, and Iceboy Violet, all testing the boundaries of club and soundsystem culture yet working faithfully around the edges. DJ Chad and DJs Di Guetto, legendary artists in their respective spheres of footwork and kuduro, show off the very best of those traditions, Chad on an extended-length crew album and DJs Di Guetto on a repressed version of an absolute classic. Lastly, what is there to say about Loppy B. The duo of SCAM and Air Max ‘97 have come through with an indescribable full-length that challenges our very conception of the organic and synthetic in digital music.
July
Henzo
The Prowl
Manchester’s Henzo is a master of the off-speed and bugged out, plying the lower boundaries of cross-Atlantic culture for sound system-specific play. The Prowl, Henzo’s latest on the equally bugged-out YCO, is a patient three-track effort that, while not so much meditative as the cliche usually goes, situates the listener at the unvarnished fringes of bass weight. Heavily gated, drawling voices are strung out over clicky, scraping percussion and rolling bass waves on “Cheapest Reverb”, while the title track positions mid-range tear-out sounds in the middle of a hallucinogenic grid.
MM & NKC
Grindhouse
Her Records has been dormant for over half a decade but its diaspora continues to come together across a series of like-minded projects and record labels. NKC’s Even The Strong is one of the most consistent of those outlets, as is the more recent Tzusing-helmed Sea Cucumber, which recently hosted Async Figure’s It’s Pulling My Strings. Ingrate (fka Kid Antoine) has also shone on a series of addictive, techy house numbers. Grindhouse, by core crewmembers MM and NKC, feels very much in the Her Records vein, albeit with a distinct cognitive map of sonic references. Impossibly tight basslines and bare-minimum rap beats are met with a series of screeching riffs and internally bursting kick emphases. Tracks like “Airprox” could easily be heard in a circa-2015 DJ set, but I’m not going to be the one complaining.
Sykors
“NA DZ7 ELA VAI DESCER”
No one has nailed the overdriven style prevalent among a certain strain of funk carioca producer than Brasília’s Sykors. “NA DZ7 ELA VAI DESCER” utilizes a vocal from Dj Adal, Mc Sapinha, and Mc Lari, but blows out the walls of the original, ramping up the volume, intensity, and sonic dimensionality. The texture of the bassline is particularly impressive, at once a substantiation of pure low-end sound as it forms in space and an abrasive digitally rendered squelch.
Ziúr
Eyeroll
Cassette, Vinyl LP
Facing up to the alienation of a post-COVID world, Ziúr has brought together an all-star team of friends and collaborators for free-jazz-cum-club epic Eyeroll. Elvin Brandhi, Abdullah Miniawy, Iceboy Violet, Juliana Huxtable, Ledef, and James Ginzburg all play key roles, linked together by Ziúr’s rototom playing and noise-making excesses. Vocalists whisper, scream, incant, and harmonize throughout, at times calling forth the libidinal economy that subtends nightlife, at others the dense, uneasy patchwork of intimate relationships in a broken world. The collaborations with Brandhi stand out as particularly efficient in their dissensus, embracing the space between voice and rhythm even as it is constantly drowned out.
August
BADSISTA
GUETO CLUB
Colombian label TraTraTrax, run by Nyksan, DJ Lomalinda, and Verraco, has had a banner few years, hosting Insta-classics from Nick León, Nicola Cruz, 3Phaz, and a host of other established and emerging artists. GUETO CLUB sees Sao Paulo favorite BADSISTA do what they do best, linking unrelenting rave production with a range of rhythmic forms from baile funk’s past and present. “COSMOVISION BASS” features a near-interpellation of Danny Weed’s “Creeper”, translating the grime constant into the push-and-pulse of funk carioca, while “VEM PRA ZONA LESTE” takes a more mainline approach, lacing robust four-on-the-floor kicks with a sleek artifice of vocal blips and clanging metal. Remixes from DJ Marfox and Batu flesh out the back end of the collection, the former an almost impossibly airtight kuduro production.
DJ Chad
Nulegacy Vol. 1
In collaboration with fellow NULEGENDZ and Beatdown House members DJ Corey, King Agee, and Bobby TSFC, DJ Chad’s Nulegacy Vol. 1 evokes the very best of the footwork tradition, patching a dense web of allusions to legendary Chicago artists while retaining a definitive focus on the dancefloor’s future. Opener “4 DJ DEEON” is an homage to the recently, and tragically, passed Chicago legend while the remaining 30 tracks operate as a speed run through the crew’s sonic imprint. Group cut “NuLegendz” is an immediate favorite, matching a lush choral section with skittering producer tags and turbulent toms. The tape is long, but latter-half highlights like “Buss Em Down” and “Loyalty World” are well worth staying for.
DJs Di Guetto
DJs Di Guetto
2 x Vinyl LP
The first releases on Lisbon’s legendary Príncipe label date back to the early 2010s, yet its spiritual roots lie in a series of compilations released in the mid 2000s that consolidated the kuduro and “guetto” sounds then bubbling out of the city’s bairros. DJs Di Guetto Vol. 1 was released in September of 2006 (I remember downloading it via a now-dead Mediafire link some years later) and came in at a relentless 37 tracks. The DJs Di Guetto crew was originally made up of Marfox, N.K., Jesse, Pausas, Fofuxo, and Nervoso, artists that continue to form the central vanguard of the kuduro sound. Now re-released in a concise 13-track package, and pressed onto a 2xLP for posterity, DJs Di Guetto is liable to be introduced to new generations of dancers. It couldn’t be more necessary in this moment.
Iceboy Violet
Not A Dream But A Controlled Explosion
If you’ve been following Iceboy Violet’s output over the past several years, including a series of standout collaborations and guest features (see here, here and here), you’ll have noticed an impressive development in the conceptual range, mic skills and writing of the Manchester-based artist. Not A Dream But A Controlled Explosion witnesses Iceboy bring those efforts back into the home fold, exploring the role of desire and fantasy across eight idiosyncratic productions that touch on, at least in the abstract, noise, grime, and drill. All production is carried out by Iceboy and the cohesion can be felt throughout, tied together by writing that touches on limits or lack thereof, the role of necessity, and the integration of fantasy into everyday life.
September
Loppy B
A Loppy Lesson
Air Max ‘97 and SCAM assemble as Loppy B once in a blue moon to unfold the molded corners of club music into evermore asynchronous shapes. 2021’s Loppy’s Lament introduced the duo to the world, while a live appearance at Sydney’s SOFT CENTRE 2022 laid out a vision for future loppy laments. A Loppy Lesson, the duo’s debut full length out now on Air Max ‘97’s DECISIONS, emerges from these two previous appearances as a series of inexplicably contoured club diatribes and unevenly distributed sheets of noise, gray space, and organic matter. Auditory coloring comes in dark greens, discomfiting yellows, and off-grays, all seeping out of the groove-centric bones of an outlandish array of rhythmic forms. Among many, “ulittlefreak” exemplifies the energy/decay relation that pulses through the entirety of A Loppy Lesson.
secat and ODAE
Laugh Jokes
Cassette
Split between svelte basslines arranged around non-quantized beats and self-described ‘frozen states’, secat and ODAE’s Laugh Jokes is simultaneously broken, riotous fun and a trip into the deep interior of placid (whether illusory or real) sound construction. secat was previously heard on twofold’s THE LOST MECHA TOOLS, one of our favorite releases of 2022, while ODAE’s Stemming, released this May, will go down as one of the year’s best, and most disconcerting, works of ambient noise. Laugh Jokes, for its part, is difficult to pin down, more a structure of feeling(s) than a coherent narrative body. And all the better for it.
Soda Plains
“Meet Me At Escados”
Soda Plains’ Living with Elvis, released in the dying embers of Summer 2022, sits as one of the most incisive releases to come out of the breakbeat canon in recent years. Meet Me At Escados picks up where that EP left off, embracing an expansive, fibrous approach to hardcore sounds strung somewhere between the main dancefloor and chillout room. Artwork by Diane Severin Nguyen perfectly matches the release’s affective drive, at once dripping with color and hewn short of standard recognition processes.
Sviej Badlalele
Play For Them
Durban Gqom Music Concepts has released over five years of on-the-cusp music from the gqom capital, initially via a regular Friday mix session hosted by African Music Concepts and later by way of solo releases and compilations. Play For Them, by Sviej Badlalele, comes in at 18 hypnotic tracks, all aimed squarely at the dancefloor and built around a handful of addictive loops. “Domestos” is the highlight of the album, taking up a slightly more dissonant tact over a foundation of unrelenting kick swells and robotic pulses.
