- Chicago natives Beau Wanzer and Melvin Oliphant, AKA Traxx, keep the "jakbeat" flag flying on their new single together as Mutant Beat Dance, following up their 2009 single In a Daze, for Discos Capablanca. Even if you're unfamiliar with jakbeat, you may have guessed that it's related to Chicago's classic, "jacking" style of electronic dance music, with an additional debt to EBM; but as the Nation Records website explains, it's also defined by what it's not. Despite its purist, analog underpinnings, jakbeat "is not just a hash back to a golden age of house, it's not just a mess of drum beats and synths, and it's not just something that is created at random."
It's easy to take such polemic with a grain of salt, but Mutant Beat Dance back it up with two tracks that manage to be classic without veering into cliché. "Another World" is a creepy, methodical descent into the land of jak, with snapping 808s that feel slower than the track's 120 BPM tempo and a purring refrain, shrouded in reverb: "This beat will make you move." It's the details that tip it into, well, another world, like the way queasy keyboards slither over a muted, two-note bassline, itself a perfect reduction of funk to a single robo-gesture. Stealthily paced, the track is a masterpiece of economy, but it still leaves room for surprising tangents, like the gentle synthesizer melody that emerges towards the end, suffused in birdsong, suggesting sunrise over the burned-out city.
"New News Is Old News" is slower and murkier, with a rolling, stepping cadence that feels like treading thin air. Dueling basslines keep the track's tonal center a moving target while dissonant counterpoints add to the air of unease, and it's topped off with a keening, vocal-like lead that could give even Ligeti the shivers. Nearly 12 minutes long, it makes every bar count, a carefully controlled smolder from beginning to end.
トラックリスト 01. Another World
02. New News Is Old News