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[incasualwater]

SeekersInternational - RunComeTest

After dalliances with junglist culture in 2016’s RaggaPreservationSociety EP, SeekersInternational’s latest 12” charts the Canadian sampling collective’s excursions through dubbier waters.

Seekers trademarks all come present and correct, but this set feels less cluttered: opener RunComeTest simmers languidly, the vocal cuttings float, tracing elliptical rings around a beat that never was, while echo and tripped out distortion draw the pads in and out of focus. Spatial awareness is developed masterfully throughout the EP – the tracks swell and pan to fill caverns of their own reverb, in which samples are scattered like clues to past inhabitants, and SKRS give us ample time to poke around and examine the oddities’ every side. FurdaMurda seems to tiptoe right up to the lo-fi textures of hometurf house labels Mood Hut and 1080p, until a piercing crack begins to whip the track into its jaunty grind – it’s the most beat-driven piece in evidence here, but even then the looping cascades won’t be taking us anywhere fast. TrialByFire follows with flanged white noise in the back of the scene – you can almost hear SKRS at work, hoovering the dust off the artefacts. From here on the mood takes a turn for the uneasy, with vocals soft but no more comforting than a burglar’s attempts to rock a baby back to sleep; in TroubleRoundDiCorner samples almost entirely take leave, but the paranoia lingers – pads blotting the canvas with murky colours that bleed into one another, seeing the EP out in rich ambiguity. RunComeTest continues on its way between pop, sample contortionism and sound bwoy psychedelia – into scuffles with nostalgia and out the other side to a hopeful retro-future that only Seekersinternational call home.

[incasualwater]

LOFT - Three Settlements Four Ways

LOFT’s second EP sees the Mancunian producer map the raucous experimental blueprints of his debut Turbulent Dynamics to the dancefloor, with intelligent techno that demonstrates undeniable command over the body.

Bookending the four-tracker, we find LOFT’s most humanoid efforts to date. The ethereal, euphoric promises of Filton Recal’s abstract vocal strains are finally laid to rest in Pottlin, where warped synthetics lament in their place: the AI love affair brought to its end with a caustic chill. Meanwhile, at ground-level, propulsive rhythmic dexterity stakes a constant claim to our attention. Given free rein in Funemployed, an answer to Aphex Twin’s Bucephalus Bouncing Ball chewed up and spat out twenty years later, the drums sidewind their way to a convincing crescendo – then a flash of silence. It’s a trope used increasingly of late by leftfield producers (Ploy, Leif, Bruce to name a few) to subvert the dance, but LOFT doesn’t take himself so seriously, and as the track splits into two – mutating and reforming, amoeba-like, in micro – it reveals itself just as playful as it is punishing. Penultimate track Oh well we’re all fucked now treads a similarly mischievous tightrope, and is the closest LOFT comes to the bravado of his first release – but while truncated industrial sounds implode one by one, a metronomic click persists in counterpoint. And with that to tether it, LOFT’s imagination flits back and forth between the club and a space far beyond.