ALWAYS EVERYTHING

ELGATO // TONIGHT

Sometimes it feels as though good 12”s are like buses – you wait for what seems like an eternity for one to arrive, then suddenly a half-dozen pile up at once and bleed your wallet dry. This week’s been one of those, with new material from James Blake, Jamie Woon’s stunning ‘Night Air’ (produced with assistance from a little-known fellow calling himself Will Bevan), A Made Up Sound’s glassy ‘Demons’ and this latest from Hessle Audio…

As we made (hopefully) abundantly clear in >our retrospective at the end of August<, Hessle Audio’s quality control is shockingly consistent. Based on the evidence of both their early forays and their recent expansion, they’re quickly establishing themselves as the seminal label to have emerged from the foggy regions surrounding the dubstep scene, even above the likes of Hyperdub, Hotflush or DMZ. It’s a fairly simple formula: even now, on their fifteenth release, they’ve yet to put a foot wrong. There’s not a single 12” on the label that drops below the ‘essential’ bracket, and while some are perhaps more essential than others, the Hessle name is quickly becoming a byword for stripped-back, ultra-percussive – but, crucially, deeply emotive - jams.

Their latest 12”, the debut from new signing Elgato, is something of a departure, but it’s one of the label’s best so far and a stunning statement. His music still retains many of the label’s sonic signatures – it’s deeply indebted to grime, displays an almost pathological attention to detail and focuses on wringing maximal effect from the fewest possible elements – but it’s slower and more considered than the majority of their releases. While many Hessle tracks require a little effort and patience to unlock their emotional content, coming across in places as a little austere, both tracks on here brim with a sense of unrequited longing. The subtle, slowly phased house of ‘Blue’ is particularly affecting, unfolding over eight drawn-out minutes but cleverly avoiding the trap of fading into a background hum.

There’s a shrewd musical ear at work here, honed through years of DJing, that sees Elgato use repetitive phrasing as a weapon to induce mass hypnosis; on a dancefloor ‘Blue’s ocean-deep bass and rattling high end takes on an entirely different, physically overwhelming form. The grimey synth stabs of ‘Tonight’, meanwhile, offer rougher pleasures. It’s a total inversion of the swift post-garage of the label’s early output: a melancholy, broken thing, its groove is stripped down to the barest essentials and drowned in autumnal rainwater. You can almost picture it knocking on your door at three am, drunk, maudlin, soaked to the skin and desperate for a couch to pass out on.

Rory