Little Fritter: Friz And Froth
Affin
Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, Kane Dignum serves up a seventy-eight-minute, twelve-track collection that provides perhaps the most comprehensive portrait to date of his Little Fritter style (he also performs with Alex James under the nil by mouth alias). Dignum weaves elements drawn from the tech-house, deep house, and minimal genres into rich and funky cuts that hold one's interest on purely listening grounds without ever losing their club focus.
The album's filled with house tracks that are hard-grooving (“Wizard With a Piece of Timb”), tight and funky (“Follow the Snail”), and atmospheric (“Keep in Mind”). The prototypical Little Fritter cut digs into its driving club groove with serious purpose while also shaking things up by using, say, a doubled voiceover of the title as a funky accent (as happens during “Bubbling Bafoon”) or peppering the material with the flow of an MC or DJ (e.g., “Googy Banter”). “Safe As House” gets the album off on the good foot with a booty-shaking tech-house groove powered by slinky hi-hats and sprinkled with soulful vocal declamations. “Chimmy Changa” stokes a wild party vibe by working bongos, voice edits, and jungle noises into its locomotive house churn, and “Diggy Did It” scatters the stuttering splinters of an exploded voice sample across the track's metronomic drive. Already issued as a single and on the recent Affin comp Joachim Spieth presents Selected 6, “Googy Banter” sounds equally at home in this context, especially when it, like the album's other tracks, rolls out a crisp house pulse that Dignum spices up with numerous little touches—in this case, a cheeky DJ voiceover, string plucks, and jungle animal accents. While track titles like “Diggy Did It” and “Chimmy Changa” indicate he doesn't regard his music as overly precious nor take himself too seriously, Dignum's dead serious when it comes to the level of craft he brings to the material he produces.February 2011