YOUTH

Mutant club flexes from YOUTH & $hotta Tapes’ alum Leo on a new LP rendering traces of UKG, dembow and brukbeats with weightless sound designer physics inna deadly style.

A certain bygone spirit of early ‘00s electronic and UK dance music guide Leo to mess with club mechanisms in expressively curious ways on ‘Dissipating Heavily.’ The tightly sculpted eight track album chases two volumes of the self-released ‘lived’ tapes with the corkscrewing results of concerted studio sessions spent eking his own sound from a Manchester air thick with ghosts of dance music’s past.

Wafting in with the melancholic sway and Pev style dubstep lean of ‘Worth’, the album buckles and tears between the peg-leg stumble of his knotty drums on ‘Banal’ to a bit of Bristol-styled dubstep tension in ‘Dramaed’, and down a trapdoor of noisier inspiration with ‘Embarrassment of Riches’. At its core, ‘Funicular’ stars out for levels of stick ’n move brukstep parry comparable to prime Demdike Stare, and ‘Courts’ zip-ties a dembow rhythm with shearing sound design to darkside effect also explored in the sidewinding momentum of ‘Jade Floors’, before ‘Passion Assets’ vents the tension upwards and outwards. 

This is a record of a quiet curse engraved at the intersection of post-club, ambient noise, and electronic ritual music. The debut work of anonymous unit SixSixSevenFortySeven by NVST and Zohar, released by Manchester-based YOUTH, one of the most prestigious labels in the current left field, has arrived on analog. Rusty iron reverberations and closed-room grooves intertwine. A labyrinth of industrial/experimental electro that traces the dark side of the city! Disturbing noise, distorted beats, and vague voices fluctuate throughout the album, the rhythm repeats like a relic of memory, and occasionally a melody lit in the distance bleeds like a scar. This is not so much an album of sound as it is an "invisible map" drawn by the ghosts of the city.

‘Beautiful Age’ is SSIEGE’s reflection on adolescence and the gauzy fidelity of memory, using an electro-acoustic array of piano, samples, tape loops, synths and field recordings to evoke feelings of longing for the eternal spring of youth.

“Lone is about loneliness and hidden places. It’s been my shelter for the last three years. It’s a work full of internalized questions. Am I still who I was before? Do I have the same energy and ambitions? Is this all still really me? A sense of nostalgia permeates through all its tracks, though each one has a different root. I’ve always felt connected to both tribal and dark atmospheres, and cinematic moods as well. The beautiful dualism with CTM’s cello, and the romantic guitar featured by Carlo Teo Pedretti speak to this; they communicate very intimate feelings. In Lone, you’ll be shackled between chorals and techno kicks. The album should carry you through my many different approaches.” – Tadleeh

YOUTH are back in town on a 3rd Sports volume packed with exclusive chops from Michael J. Blood, Rat Heart, Sockethead, pigbaby, FUMU, and Iueke, plus new cats Craig Birrel and Zesknel among many others. Programmed by footie-mad graphic designer/DJ, Andrew Lyster, ’Sports 3’ casts a wide net over work by Youth label friends and extended family with results limning a dead cranky conception of club music and blooz/beatdown pressure. All sharing a taste for texture that sounds like the masters were left to decompose for winter, the 16 cuts map odd gooches and ginnels of the contemporary soundsphere from the washed-out jazz reminiscence of Zesknel next to harder-to-place works such as the metallic cyborgian slug of ‘Driesh’ by Craig Birrel, or the groggy breaks of ‘Cocaine’ from HR For Drug Dealers. Pigbaby plays the game with a highlight of midnight keys on ‘Far From Home’, and we spy a zinger from Sockethead on the feral yowl of ‘Coarse Ground’, while Dave Saved keeps it slanted on ‘Abisso 66’ and into a super glum one by the still enigmatic Yugen Disciple. That sense of entropy also infects the set’s more energetic bits, as with the PointilisticT arp flight of ’T’ by S, and the drowning struggle of ‘When It Rains (It Pours)’ from Significant Other complementing the worn out acid trample of Iueke’s ‘Videoslash’ and Jessic*nt’s murky stealth bomb ‘Manic/Panic’. Rat Heart, Michael J. Blood x Sockethead unsurprisingly steal the show on the slow cymbal-crash blooz of ‘True’, and the album ends with Lyster’s own VIP of NW / HR tripped & screwed hardcore submersion.