ALWAYS EVERYTHING

12”s YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

8. Midland – Play The Game EP [Phonica]

Despite playing his collaborative 12” with Ramadanman to death earlier this year (the excellent Your Words Matter on Aus Music), I managed to let Midland’s debut release proper slip by when it emerged last month, which makes it a prime contender for addition to this series. It’s not very often that you come across a pitch-perfect synthesis of current styles, but the title track on his Play The Game EP reaches something Pariah’s Safehouses strives for but never quite manages: a fusion of recent dancefloor trends that sounds totally confident in its own space. There are traces of Hessle and Hotflush, especially in its brisk skipping motion and lush, dreamy pads, but ‘Play The Game’ is all smoke and mirrors, downpitched vocals buffeted in a hailstorm of glassy breaks.

There’s a palpable aura of mystery to Midland’s music, which goes some way towards explaining how he maintains such a solid identity in a crowd of artists making similar music (in that sense he could be filed alongside George Fitzgerald in the post-Joy Orb landscape – both create something distinct out of the same basic buiding blocks). The rest of the EP drops the tempo and ups the house groove: Midland’s remix of his and Furiku’s ‘Leitmotif’ takes nearly four minutes to reach full capacity, peaking in clouds of smoky dancefloor melancholy, and Dexter’s remix of the title track is more muscular but sacrifices a little of the deliciously indistinct nature of the rest of the EP. ‘Heads Down’ is tightly wound but hazy, so out of focus that it sounds filtered through six feet of water, and reaches the same dizzy heights as the title track through an entirely different methodology.

It was only when Joy Orbison booked Source Direct to play at his first Doldrums party in July that I made the connection between the humid shimmer of their music and the gorgeous synths scattered all over tracks like ‘Hyph Mngo’. That same lineage springs to mind when Midland unleashes an explosion of junglist breaks onto the restrained backdrop of ‘Play The Game’ – listen to a track like 1996’s ‘Secret Liaison’ and you can practically hear the influence creeping down the nuum’s wires like so much electricity. It’s a constant process of reappropriation and redesign; when I interviewed Coldcut’s Jonathan Moore the other day his description seemed perfectly tailored: “Things… are born, grow, get consumed, get eaten, regurgitated and return as another form.”

Rory

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