VCTRE Expands His Horizons in Palindrome LP

The last three years have seen VCTRE stake an audacious claim within the underground bass community. The vicious, punk veneer across his music has made him a fast rising star amongst his contemporaries, earning him prime slots across numerous festivals, showcases and concerts, as well as a rapidly growing, flamboyant fan base. He’s brought his production and engineering chops to new heights across the last year especially, culminating in the full-spectrum album Palindrome.

The earthy grit featured in VCTRE productions takes on new dimensions in Palindrome as he pushes his sound design chops towards wider horizons. The amalgam of styles and moods on the album is a testament to his evolving compositional perspective, with some of the most standout tracks in the collection also being the least imposing. While plenty of guttural distortion and massive stereo compression find a home in the latter half of the release, the first half features an abundance of downbeat, chilled-out tunes, fully equipped with VCTRE’s trademarked, speaker-blasting textures. It’s a noteworthy combination, given that so much of his catalog thus far has focused on the brawny end of bass music. 

Of particular note are the tracks “Human Eel” and “Morning Sky”; side by side, they best capture and display the depth of character featured across Palindrome. With its ungulant, viscous stabs and syncopated arrangement structure, every burst of low end in “Human Eel” responds to a bend in the frequency spectrum. What carries itself primarily as a gun slinging, half-time saunter quietly and impressively transforms into a skewed full time breakdown to close out the track. It’s the kind of composition that flexes the full potency of VCTRE’s patented aural aggression while simultaneously pushing his envelope beyond its traditional edge.

“Morning Sky” takes the attitude of Palindrome in an entirely unique direction, wielding a classic 4x4 beat accentuated by swelling pads and brooding atmospheres. It’s industrial and lucid, and the minimalist production allows for each aspect of the track to shine clearly through the mix. Sky Swift makes an appearance with her flangered, saturated vocals, adding a fresh breath of life into the veins of the song. Soft edges and acute harmonies put her at the center of the arrangement, giving the direct, austere dance floor tune a warm glow and an infectious bite.

2019 saw VCTRE rise with meteoric velocity, and the fanfair is well earned. He’s separated himself from the pack through intuitive, potent production skills and a knack for redeveloping his sound at every turn. He’s staked his claim onstage across the United States, blasting through the festival and touring circuits with few signs of an impending slowdown. As we enter 2020, the landscape of bass music is bound to change as it always has. Of the few constants we can guarantee, VCTRE’s continued dominance of his niche is certainly one of them.

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Veteran Heavyweight Frequent Unravels Frequencies in Grass Rat [SINGLE]

Pushing modern sound design and drum and bass sensibilities to their logical extremes, the production heavyweight Frequent unravels the frequency spectrum in his single “Grass Rat”. Being both a longtime veteran of bass music evolution and the co-owner of Upscale Recordings, it should come as no surprise that the track is as brawny as it is erratic.

Living up to its name, “Grass Rat” features a bucked, broken quality to it’s synthesis. Granular textures and obtuse engineering place the most mottled and resampled tones at the front of the song, showcasing the legendary sound design chops that first put Frequent on the map. The track opens with a full time beat down, hurling the composition into a violent half-time streek. The rhythm is accented not just by massive downbeats and staccato percussion, but also by the cuts and warps within the bassline itself. It’s that lively mingling of instrumentation that makes “Grass Rat” a veritable journey through the darkest reaches of bass music.

Given his tenure as both a genre-bending producer and curator of similar productions, Frequent has an immutable understanding of bass music composition. Even in the midst of a heavily saturated market and sound, his tracks have a way of shining just that much brighter, lending credence to his credentials as a master of his craft. While we can’t be sure what 2020 will bring, we’re excited at the possibility of “Grass Rat” being just a taste of what’s to come.

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Broken Note Unleashes Massive 15-track LP “Exit The Void”

The speaker creatures running the show at Slug Wife have a way of one-upping themselves on a fairly constant basis. Sound design is the name of their game, and their roster carries some of the progenitor producers and engineers involved with contemporary bass music. Alongside Seppa and Kursa, Broken Note is one of the original Slugs to carry the mantle, placing him directly in the center of low-end design’s Gastropoda enterprise. After spending the last year deep at work in his laboratory, he’s crafted what is undoubtedly his most ambitious release to date: Exit The Void.

Exit The Void is a 15-track album brimming with distorted textures and hair-splitting rhythmic switch-ups. Broken Note’s music is exactly as his name suggests; staccato, abrupt, and unabashedly glitchy. Over the course of a tenured career that spans more than a decade, he’s been at the forefront of modern bass design since his inception, driving the burgeoning sounds of neuro and half-time drum’n’bass since their infancy. What has always set him characteristically apart from his contemporaries is the extremely punk veneer and aesthetic to his music. Exit The Void expands the horizons of that attitude. His mixes are certifiably clean by all measures, but the music itself is a blanket of distortion and intentional phasing. Clipped, dented, and fractured bits of audio are his weapons of choice, and he wields them with remarkable dexterity. Whether it’s speaker-shredding low-end in “Pressure Chamber”, or the intentionally malfunctioning breaks in “Iron Sky” or “Parabolic Hex”, his music channels through the ears like a data stream fighting its way to sentience. It’s an ultimately successful fight, giving Exit The Void the illusion of biological growth.

Broken Note is often the quieter of his slug compatriots, but never for lack of ambition. His head-down work habits have paid off time and again in the form of mentally-scintillating music and performances, especially throughout the stateside Slug Wife takeover earlier this year. Pushing the boundaries of sound and pressure wherever and however he can, Broken Note has never failed to deliver on his evolving ferocity. This time around, he’s managed to completely break those boundaries altogether, bending the frequency spectrum into a fantastically spectral adventure. For all those seeking the dark, undulant bits within bass music, your next fix is waiting inside the folds of Exit The Void.

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