- Slow, feet-dragging "knackered house" has been a sound of the past 12 months or so, turning from a loose collection of producers to a veritable Thing. One artist who has been slowing his music down dramatically is Toronto-via-Berlin's XI, but the debut of his new project Ambalance (a collaboration with fellow Torontonian Skeleton Bone) brings it to a morphine drip too amorphous in its intoxicated sway to match his hi-hat-heavy house.
This debut EP might be called Cokewave, but that's a bit of a misnomer; the duo's bandcamp page also carries the more accurate tag "heroin house." Limping on a kick drum at a wounded 96 BPM "Hello Nobody" quivers with dusty, bulging chords, as all manner of warped string samples drip down the walls. It's an auspiciously dramatic debut, and the following "Lawn Gong" doesn't disappoint, all drunkenly stumbling basslines and trilling synths that get lost in their own soft focus. The aptly-titled "Snooze Button" slows things all the way down to 88 BPM, a half-asleep soundscape occasionally punctured by strands of intrusive synth and pads that sigh in the distance. For something that seems like a joke at first—the stupid title, the misspelled artist name—the music on Cokewave is a lot more mature than it lets on.
Tracklist01. Hello Nobody
02. Lawn Gong
03. Snooze Button