If you spent any real time in a pair of headphones around 2012, the name Blackmill just did something to your chest you were not braced for. He mostly vanished for years, the way the best melodic producers always seem to, and here he is remixing Blake Farfan’s Surface like no time passed at all. The whole Blackmill signature is intact: that warm, slightly weary guitar tone, drums that hit soft and still land somewhere deep, a low end you feel before you hear it. He takes Farfan’s track and slows its pulse down, stretching the melody out until it genuinely aches, which was always his real gift, patience disguised as a drop. There is a stretch where everything falls away to a single guitar figure and a far-off vocal, and that quiet does more work than most producers get out of their loudest moment. This is music for the long drive home after you have run out of things to say to yourself. I did not realise I had been waiting for a new Blackmill until MrSuicideSheep put this in front of me, and now I cannot leave it alone.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.