- SVBKVLT is a new label out of Shanghai, run by Shelter co-founder Gaz Williams and affiliated with his Sub-Culture collective. So far Williams has been releasing talent from around Asia—including, among others, sometime Kode9 vocalist ChaCha—in limited cassette runs. Kode9, in fact, is a regular fixture at the Sub-Culture nights, and the label's vinyl debut echoes the Hyperdub boss's own recent preoccupation: the fertile rhythmic nexus between dance floor-ready trap-rap and footwork.
"Dagger," from Shanghai/Tokyo duo S L V, leans towards the halftime side of things. It's unremarkable rap at the opening, with a down-pitched vocal sample intoning "Get your money, hustle up" over drilling snares and 808 bass. But before long a dense synth cloud descends, and we remain in its gently euphoric clutches for most of the remainder. Desto's remix amps up the track's dance floor potential with triplet-duplet syncopations and galloping footwork-style low-end. The Finnish producer is an experienced explorer of this stylistic terrain, and his reworking is appropriately slick, its dense percussive lattices managing to convey weightlessness without tipping over into the cluttered.
TracklistA Dagger
B Dagger (Desto Remix)