Polish producer 2K88 makes dark, glitching tracks that honour his country’s rap history and UK bass music. So when Poland’s Unsound festival asked him to team up with a group of British musicians, it made sense that he was drawn to Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, all of whom craft murky, genre-agnostic sounds best suited to after hours. The trio joined 2K88 for a residency in his home city of Gdynia last year ahead of a live performance at the festival in Kraków; the material they conjured up has now been developed into 10 full tracks.
As you might expect from their respective solo projects, this record is haunting and vaporous, with glacial sound design, fragments of FX’d voice and stabs of low end. Opening track Everything Always Changes sets the vibe as textural drones merge into Duffus’s gauzy, looped vocals. Miller’s elegiac spoken word adds grandeur to the ambience, an effect intermittently upheld by soaring synths on In Stardust Garden … (Empress Ballroom) and Purple Mauve.
There are also shades of leftfield R&B as Duffus coos sensuously around a rumbling Kelela-style hook in Salto, and in the slo-mo drum pattern underpinning Forevers Just Trust in Another Day. But even these are filtered through a moody lens: beats are sporadically deconstructed and strewn with distorted sounds.
At points the breathy, amorphous production feels bland and interstitial rather than atmospheric. At others, it feels on the nose. On the closing reprise, Miller’s earnest delivery verges on corny, especially when cut against an ethereal choral loop. But these taxing moments are redeemed by a handful of truly beautiful ones: the woozy, collage-like composition in A Random Introduction; Scout’s whispered incantations on Poetic Fallacy. Here, the quartet’s innovation shines through the fog.
Also out this month
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