Veröffentlicht
Oct 10, 2024Veröffentlicht
August 2024
- Weighty dub illuminating bassweight's synergy with the natural world.
- Scorpio Red likes to deconstruct well-known genres. The platform's three-year-old catalogue spans reggaeton, R&B and club music, with each release indulging in a shadowy interpretation of its core references. On Avario, the polyrhythmic techno of Ecuador's Entrañas and Ene Ese is far more disjointed and loopy than most contemporary dance music from Latin America. Zeynep Ağcabay's excellent Memories from the Future gives trip-hop a dissociative feel with phantasmal dog barks. Scorpio Red's latest offering extends these experimental leanings further afield.
Forest Casual's Drum, Botany & the Brash is an EP of dubby folk music that taps into the trickster ends of both spacious dub and twangy folk, expertly balancing bass with old-world string instruments like the bouzouki (a steel-stringed mandolin) and banjo. Musicians Thomas Morley, one-half of live act mosspit, and Harry Murdoch, AKA TT Label affiliate hmurd, are entirely unconcerned about making functional dance music. Instead, they indulge in whimsical delight via meandering synthy passages. "Gwallt yn y Ffynnon (slip jig)" shows just how indulgent the pair can be—huge bass womps stretch out for a good three-and-a-half minutes, until creaky strings finally emerge from the track's underbelly.
Drum, Botany & the Brash's stand-out quality is the way Forest Casual delicately mixes heavy low-end into patient chords and ultra-textural ambient. On opener "Crockerne Pill," strings merge into gong-like vibrations and deep drum science, channelling the healing power of sound system music. We're immersed in nature on "Transients Cadw," where the duo throws in what sounds like the crisp chatter of a tawny wren. One of the highlights, the track gracefully transitions from high-pitched warbles (what the duo refer to as "wood-pidgeon wub") to blunted bass. It's easy to imagine the duo diligently perched on a branch armed with a Tascam and treats—think of them as sonic foragers or "the funglist massive," according to the EP liner notes.
By allowing each track to breathe, Drum, Botany & the Brash becomes full of intimate moments that create intrigue and build up to a sense of wonder. It's a reminder of dub music's spiritual disposition.
Tracklist01. Crockerne Pill
02. Transients Cadw
03. What Goes On Tor
04. Gwallt yn y Ffynnon (slip jig)