Buunshin keeps building tracks that sound like they were assembled out of glass. “Luminous Body” opens with these clean, almost fragile melodic tones and then the low end slides underneath so smoothly you don’t notice the floor’s gone until you’re already falling. This producer sits in that lane where dubstep and forward-facing sound design overlap, and the design work here is absurd — every bass note has its own texture, none of them muddying into each other. The drop at 1:35 doesn’t reach for maximum weight, it reaches for precision, a bassline that folds in on itself like origami. That kind of restraint is rarer than aggression and much harder to pull off. I’ve listened four times trying to figure out how the second drop mutates the first and I still can’t fully map it. It rewards headphones over a club rig, honestly, because there’s detail in the high end a big system would just flatten. Music this considered that never once tips into cold or academic is a narrow target to hit. Buunshin lands it clean.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.