- French DJ/producer Nicolas Chaix, AKA I:Cube, is one of those guys who does what he likes and does it well. He's as good at loopy downtempo as strutting house, and when he was in the mood for loping Metro Area-style post-disco a couple years ago, he delivered the still-disarming "Falling."
"Transpiration," the A-side of I:Cube's newest EP for the venerable Paris label Versatile (which has released nearly all of his work), sounds like it was an idea before it was a track: What if you cut the filtered hi-hats and grainy percussion and thick kick drum of a regular contemporary French house track with an all-thumbs synth riff and swooning air-raid siren straight out of Belgium, circa 1992? The two traditions don't have a ton in common other than adjacent geography, but damn if Chaix doesn't make the combination sound utterly natural—especially when he brings in a counter-riff on a synth that's more fluid and aggressively computer-like, evoking the early '90s Detroit-Berlin axis on top of everything else.
Or just feel free to ignore all that history and enjoy "Transpiration" as a pure peak-time monster, whatever your (or its) affiliation(s). That doesn't apply to Lucifer en Discothèque's other two cuts, the messy cosmic synth-run title track and the playfully squiggly "Jah Menta." The A-side is an A-side for a reason.
トラックリスト A Transpiration
B1 Jah Menta
B2 Lucifer En Discothèque