Banzulu: In Transit EP
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Wagz: City Lights EP
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Having dedicated much of 2019 to singles releases, none60 closes out the year with an EP series, with those by Wagz and Banzulu showing just how elastically the drum'n'bass template can be stretched. Anyone thinking the genre's one-dimensional or limited in scope will have that misconception soundly challenged by these sets.
Of the two, Wagz's City Lights hews more generally to genre form, but even here the range of exploration is strikingly broad. The title track inaugurates the EP with dramatic dollops of transporting atmosphere as the Sheffield producer embellishes a bass-throbbing foundation with a magnificent array of synthesizer textures. If ever a track qualified as ambient drum'n'bass, it's this meticulously crafted ode to nighttime in the big city. The mood established, Wagz moves on to something harder-hitting, with “Something Fades” rolling out a crisp funk pulse sweetened with steel guitar-like shadings. Though a double-time groove takes over at the 1:30 mark for extra punch, Wagz is careful to not let it dilute the atmospheric character of the production. In the EP's second half, an intricate drum pattern powers “Detour,” its mutating snare-and-kick drum combination calling to mind classic Photek; for added interest, a mid-song breakdown includes a snippet of Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle from 2014's True Detective (“You know, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person”). Bringing the EP full circle is “After Hours,” which revisits the splendour of the title cut with seven anthemic minutes of drum-powered atmospherics. Even a cursory listen to the EP reveals ambient, IDM, jungle, and dub colours surfacing amidst the drum'n'bass grooves, the release a standalone testament to how multi-dimensional the genre can be.
If the release by Banzulu duo Abe Vazquez and Caleb Selman is closer in spirit to footwork than drum'n'bass per se, that's no knock against it: the material dazzles whatever the label one chooses to affix to it. The label requested a full EP's worth of Banzulu material after hearing the opening cut “Aeroport,” and it's easy to see why. Layers of hyperspeed beats, bass pulses, and electronics ricochet, jitter, and splatter like some seizure-gripped colossus, the result a flickering and fluctuating mass of sound that holds together cohesively despite feeling as if it could go off the rails at any moment. Percolating incessantly, the music pushes forth insistently until “Gulfstream” chills the pace ever so slightly, with a bright, ascending synth figure the nucleus around which African-styled percussion flurries erupt. Even more mind-melting is “Taxi,” what with its trippy vocal stutter effect and upper-register synth flourishes, whereas “Babylon Dead!” works its own kind of feverish magic by punctuating Afrogroove percussion flurries with dread-fueled horn declamations and bass throbs. Similar to the Wagz set, In Transit resists easy stylistic capture, with Banzulu bringing a jazzy effervescence to the four productions. Headspinning guaranteed.November 2019