![]() ![]() Structurally, Zomby's own 'ardcore-revivalist vibes have often resembled tiny nuclear reactors constantly powering up and malfunctioning, brief bursts of energy with short half-lifes. Soul Music's most straightforwardly dusty moments are reminiscent of the recent work of Zomby, the bass music enfant terrible who's made a name off of contorting dance music's history in his own twisted, smoggy visage. ![]() The songs collected on Soul Music are similarly and gleefully overstuffed, a series of funhouse constructions that approach mania with cool-handed seriousness. The straight-techno tracks that Woolford's put out under his name and other aliases have often been colorful and full, beacons of chaos even during minimal techno's light stranglehold on the genre. ![]() Not to say that Soul Music isn't sonically slavish to its nostalgic ideals, too: junglist breaks abound, along with plenty of strangled vocal samples and sound effects that give each track its own open-transmission vibe. Woolford's "no rules" approach is evident from Soul Music's opening track, "Forbidden", an icy slice of techno reinforcing the notion that Special Request is less about evoking the sounds of pirate radio's heyday and more about recreating its anything-goes attitude. When Four Tet's Kieran Hebden unleashed his own pirate-radio hat-tip this year in the form of "Kool FM", there was an expectation that the according full-length, Beautiful Rewind, would similarly dive headlong into clattering waters that record turned out to be more subtle than expected, so anyone disappointed by Hebden's muted elegance on display there will most likely find the head-rush corrective they're looking for in Soul Music's 12 tracks. With a sense of nasty-edged playfulness that keeps the project's nostalgia from lapsing into stiff reverence, it's unquestionably one of the most exciting dance records of this year. Capitalizing on the increase in attention, Special Request's proper debut LP, Soul Music, pushes the needle into the red again with winning results. ![]() The 38-year-old Woolford's recent tendency of looking towards the past has coincided with a spate of new visibility for the producer, who's been churning out high-grade techno for nearly a decade under his own name: his single for Hotflush this year, "Untitled", has become something of a low-level "hit", adding another jewel to the accomplished producer's already impressive crown. With Death of Rave, sound deconstructionist Leland Kirby dismantled rave's glory days as a tribute to the culture, degrading its sounds until there was little more than an exquisite corpse left over meanwhile, Burial's own decayed-throwback style owes something to the enigmatic producer becoming enamored with artifacts of an era he didn't experience first-hand: "Old jungle, rave and hardcore.they still sound future to me." "So there are no rules." The relative constraints applied to Special Request speak to a method of creating new rules to escape the encumberances of ones already in place in other words, it's a highly conceptual project, and not the first of its kind. "The attractive thing about pirate radio is that it sits outside of convention," Woolford told FACT earlier this year while discussing his still-strong attachment to the format. ![]()
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