Blawan – Jackel Ter9’s/Ste Shine - Mid-life Crisis [Folk Wood]

Double-header featuring Blawan and Ste Shine taking a side each. Blawan came out the blocks hard with his first release on Hassle Audio, tough and percussive, just the way we like it. Hard tribal beats got chopped and flipped into rolling grime-like approximations of garage and dubstep via a rolling techno sensibility that hits in the perfect place between dance floor prowess and deep propulsive head nodding energy that verges on the meditative if you weren’t so busy catching those rhythms. His second release comes on Folk Wood with Ste Shine, whose deeper vision balances out the 12” nicely.

The lazer guided synths blips on ‘Jackel Ter9’s’ ride the rolling grooves like a twisted sibling of grimes past with smeared synth textures taking over adding a twisted energy that really bursts out the speakers. Vibes of Kode9’s ‘Black Sun’ can be heard in the down tuned synth squiggles, but its taken into a different place. Plus the rhythmic patterns echo the tough tribalism of his first release, a garage dubstep hybrid that does that dubstep thing of balancing space and time to create dance floor tension that oozes pent up energy.

Ste Shine drops an altogether deeper and more spaced out track, ‘Mid-life Crisis’ harness melodic synth patterns and the original dubstep vibe that gets twisted into a tense almost sinogrime shape that gets crossed with this early Warp-like energy. Drum hits get tweaked and dubbed into orbit, bass pulses hit the chest and the synths get seriously hypnotic with their melodies.

There is a stripped back simplicity to these tracks that keeps the energy tightly wound and raw. Blawan brings the energy and really kills it yet again and Ste Shine takes it deep. Solid 12”.

http://www.myspace.com/blawan
http://www.myspace.com/steshine
http://www.myspace.com/folkwood

Originally written for Sonic Router.