Amp//Xist is a new name with a much longer history behind it, drawing on decades spent around dance music for Shadow Jerk (Ya Body), a two-track EP that moves between the warmer, more immersive reaches of hypnotic techno and something rawer, leaner and more unsettled.
Percussion sits at the heart of both tracks, but they pull it in quite different directions, offering an early introduction to a project whose influences run deep without being especially easy to pin down.
There’s something particularly absorbing about Resodrum, built around hand-played drums that have been recorded, processed and pulled far enough from their acoustic origins that it becomes difficult to tell exactly where they came from. They roll through warm low frequencies and hazy electronics, drawing from the slower, more immersive end of hypnotic techno while carrying some of the looseness and sensuality of early minimal house.
Diffusion Network comes from a more brittle place, keeping the depth but replacing some of Resodrum’s warmth with sharper electronics, clipped percussion and a persistent feeling of tension. It reaches towards techno’s more skeletal and experimental edges, where repetition becomes slightly disorientating and small changes assume disproportionate weight, while strange details appear at the edges of the track and disappear almost as quickly.
Although Amp//Xist itself is only just beginning to surface, the project comes from someone who has been involved with dance music in various capacities since the 1980s. That history is deliberately kept in the background, but inevitably finds its way into the records, particularly in the hand-played breaks and percussion, and in arrangements informed by years spent absorbing house, techno, dub and the less easily defined spaces between them.
Shadow Jerk (Ya Body) offers an early glimpse into a project that already seems to have found its own corner, somewhere between warmth and abrasion, the familiar and the slightly strange.
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