- Belfast's Jack Hamill ought to be riding high after the release of his hugely ambitious debut LP-cum-space opera Welcome To Mikrosector-50. In many ways it was the culmination of Hamill's aesthetic: a narrative-driven, tongue-in-cheek approach that takes in oily synth-funk, frenzied Drexciyan electro, cosmic house and plenty else besides. This, the first in a new series of SDC releases, sees him return to Clone Royal Oak for the first time since 2010's Journey To The Core Of The Unknown Sphere. Correlation #1 is more stylistically narrow than its predecessor—all of the tracks here cleave to a soft-edged house template (save for the exquisite New Age synth drift of closer "Petrichor"). But, as we might have expected from Hamill, this is house music for Martian terraces: rich, bright, strange and luxurious.
"First Glance" and "Butterflies Of Malaysia" are the highlights, gorgeous pastel-shaded jams led by their lissome G-funk melodies and dextrous chord work. "Chemoreceptor" is fractionally sterner, though it ascends to a stately peak over its six minutes. If we had to lose one it would be the fittingly titled "Familiar Terrain," which less strikingly covers similar ground to its companions. These tracks—smooth, tuneful, gracefully uncoiling—are close relatives of Floating Points' Shadows EP, and like Floating Points, their chief weakness is that they are perhaps too slickly executed. Then again, when the squiggly melody bursts through in the closing minutes of "Butterflies Of Malaysia," you might think that that's not a weakness at all.
トラックリストA1 First Glance
A2 Familiar Terrain
B1 Butterflies Of Malysia
B2 Chemoreceptor
B3 Petrichor