ALWAYS EVERYTHING

KASSEM MOSSE // WE SPEAK TO THOSE

I’ve written enough about a certain Mr. Mosse recently I know, but his output has been so ferociously consistent lately that it seems unjust to ignore his latest 12” release. Arriving as something of a curveball on Instra:mental’s Nonplus+ imprint (typically known for its forays into Autonomic-styled d’n’b and dubstep, though admittedly Actress’ excellent Machine & Voice EP was another major anomaly), it’s a far cry from the sumptuous deep house of his recent Laid release with Lowtec. In fact, it shares more than just a label with Actress, inhabiting a very similar space where analogue equipment goes rogue on its owner and flies off in all manner of bizarre and brilliant directions.

So while some of Mosse’s previous music (particularly the excellent untitled material on Workshop) shares similar behaviour patterns – namely a tendency to shatter electro beats down to their constituent parts and rebuild from scratch – ‘We Speak To Those’ is an even starker exercise in minimalism. Its kick drums sound like someone beating a metal bin, and dropping around that rigid chassis is a formidable array of dissonant filters and junkshop percussive hits; it’s as if someone’s transported >Stomp< to a Berlin warehouse.

Which makes the tribal mania of ‘Hi Res’ even more of a shock when the record’s flipped. Running at a breathless 150bpm, it judders awkwardly around the sort of synth figure you’d expect to hear in a sci-fi videogame (if anyone remembers Deus Ex, you’ll know exactly the sort of thing I’m referring to), and would take an almost superhuman effort to dance to - at least not without looking like some sort of many-legged crab thing. Instead it’s music to observe and absorb, and works as a pretty potent reminder that if you speed dance music up enough it begins to blur into a relaxing multisensory whirl, accelerating beyond the body’s metabolic rhythms into a different region entirely.

Kassem Mosse is playing live at Caravan in Bristol on 5th November, alongside October, Kowton, Emptyset and Chris Farrell.

Rory