About halfway through AcidBoy a 303 line comes squirming up out of the mix like something that shouldn’t be alive, and from that point the track belongs to it. This is dubstep built on an acid backbone, a pairing that has no business working as well as it does: the squelch of classic acid house wrapped in the weight of modern bass music. Phosphr is a UKF Dubstep find and the channel clearly heard what I’m hearing, a producer with a real feel for tension who isn’t afraid to let a sound get genuinely ugly. The low end is filthy in the useful sense, all grit and no polish, and the acid line threads through it like a wire come loose. What I like most is that it never fully resolves the friction between the two ideas. The acid keeps wanting to sprint, the bass keeps dragging it back down into the mud, and the tug of war is the entire appeal. It’s not a track for casual volume. Give it a proper system and the 303 will crawl right up your spine.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.