ALWAYS EVERYTHING

NEW MOVES // ZOMBY

It’s been pretty quiet on the Zomby front over the past twelve months or so, the man of mystery putting little out since last year’s absolutely glorious Digital Flora 10” on Brainmath. Alongside ‘Tarantula’, his contribution to Hyperdub’s Five Years Of compilation, it pointed towards a gradual evolution of his sound, away from the sickly gloop of his self-titled EP and One Foot Ahead Of The Other’s day-glo dancefloor antics. Instead, it saw him craft a deep, beautifully understated form of house – at the time I described it as ‘something that could soundtrack a film noir set along the banks of the modern day Thames… bathed in eddies of purple murk, [with] tiny flashes of melody sweeping past like car headlights’ – something he’s further honed with a raft of new sounds emerging over the last couple of weeks.



First up, his contributions to Ninja Tune’s twentieth anniversary collection, both of which turned up on a foolishly cheap 12” alongside excellent material from The Bug, Daedelus and Two Fingers. ‘The Forest’ could almost be ‘Digital Flora’ Part Two, exploring much the same twilight region, all aquatic, rippling percussion and garish casio tones that pirouette like bubbles of air through water. Alongside the gradually attenuating drum rolls of the crushing ‘Orchid’, it has an evocative, Drexciyan charm. Both feel far shorter than their runtimes, and they seem to absorb all the energy out of the space surrounding them – the only solution seems to be to spin the record again.

And then, for the first time in about a year, Dusk & Blackdown’s (reliably excellent) Rinse FM show last week contained one of their traditional Zomby showcases, unearthing some new more of his new material. This short mix shows him in similarly contemplative form – all seven tracks blend into one, deeply melodic whole, tough to separate into constituent parts but seeing him smoothly move from beatless Devil mix-style grime to his most disorienting music yet. At times the sharp angles seem almost impossible to navigate – let alone dance to! – but at one point I’m pretty sure Erykah Badu’s voice appears for a fraction of a second before disappearing into the depths again. The mix starts at about 1:07:30 into the show - >which is available to download here< - but the whole thing is well worth a couple of hours of your time.



Finally, the last ever Mary Anne Hobbs show was graced with a totally immersive mix from Burial and Kode9, which opened with possibly Zomby’s most beautiful track so far, ‘Natalia’s Song’. Apparently it’s an older dub from around the time of his first Hyperdub releases that never saw the light of day, but its heartbroken two-step shuffle is every bit as affecting as Burial at his best; hopefully it’ll find its way into the world properly at some point.

Rory