Iglooghost – Gold Coat (feat Cuushe)
With the mashed chords and bumping hip-hop tempo of his Treetunnels cassette last year, teenage producer Iglooghost was angling to be the UK’s answer to Flying Lotus. FlyLo has clearly taken the compliment, signing him to Brainfeeder for the Chinese Nü Yr EP, out later this month. Iglooghost’s productions have really stepped up a gear, now featuring the shiny plastic aesthetic of Rustie, Visionist and PC Music. His own explanation of his sound is … well, have a read: “The EP is a story about a gelatinous worm-shaped creature who wears a witch hat called xiāngjiāo. He/she is really sad because his/her existence consists of infinitely being blasted through endless wormholes into different worlds that don’t make any sense – full of floating fruit and pink mist. He/she has a voice played by my little sister but sometimes my dad. He/she is perennially sad and terrified because it doesn’t make any sense why he/she was randomly born into this existence, but he/she is also shit scared because being shot at light speed through wormholes is probably fucking terrifying.” Got it?
Call Super – Migrant
After the beautiful, fragmentary techno-jazz on his Suzi Ecto album last year, Call Super returns with a 12in built around some very sturdy deep house. B-side Meltintu is an attentive midtempo number full of darting arpeggiation, but A-side Migrant is the real winner. Almost languid in comparison, it is hot with rainforest humidity, and lit by some crowdpleasing marimba. But there is an extraordinary level of detail scurrying between the leaves: doleful bird calls, a flute that gets cut off mid-note, the far-off crack of a whip. There’s clearly trouble in paradise. And as you’re led through this rich landscape, there’s still plenty of room to move around – it’s a masterly production.
Herva – All Good on Your Side
Happy 20th birthday to Planet Mu, Mike Paradinas’s label,, which put out the fiendish blurts of Venetian Snares and Vex’d, the grime quests of Terror Danjah, and most importantly, broke footwork out of Chicago and brought it to the wider world. There is a 20th-anniversary box set out this month to revisit the aforementioned, and much more. But the label moves forward with new signings too, like Herva, an Italian producer who is all over the stylistic map. His album, Kila, takes in blown-out acid techno, pondwater glitch and crunchy hip-hop, but the winner for me is the opening track All Good on Your Side, premiering exclusively here. The track ends up like a wonky take on Andrés’ disco-house classic New For U, and there’s even a sultry vocal reminiscent of Brenda Lee’s “Uh huh, honey” that Kanye sampled for Bound 2.
Gerry Read – Limp Biscuit Anthem
No, it’s not Nookie, Rollin’ or any other Fred Durst related nu-metal, but rather a house anthem which is so summery it could postpone the clocks going back until well into November. Suffolk-raised Read is in his early 20s but has already been producing for a few years, putting out tightly wound, ghetto-tinged house, the percussion of which sounds like someone bumping round the kitchen at night. (Check out his EPs on Aus and Delsin, his 2012 album Jummy, and the diva-house pastiche 90s Prostitution Racket.) Limp Biscuit Anthem is his most anthemic moment yet – a glorious Miami-disco collision. B-side Touching Me, meanwhile, is a very tasty bit of high-speed UKG.
Tortoise – Gesceap
The long-running Chicago outfit will return in 2016 with their seventh album, The Catastrophist, and this is the first track taken from it. Often described as post-rock by people who can’t comprehend a bunch of mostly white guys playing jazz with guitars, the band’s back catalogue is a frequently magical place in which to wander. (Monica and Glass Museum are its loftiest peaks.) Last time round, on 2009’s Beacons of Ancestorship, they were shredding in their (probably quite tidy) garage with lots of “real” instruments, but if Gesceap is anything to go by, they’re bringing back the electronic textures that were such a strong feature of Standards and It’s All Around You. It’s a study in simple melody and overlapping rhythms in a classic American minimalist tradition, played on wide buzzing synth lines, with a classic Tortoise drum shuffle underneath.
