- With many ears attuned to American fringe dance music these days, Austin Cesear ought to be in fierce demand. But, since emerging with the Cruise Forever LP on Public Information in 2012, the Bay Area producer has remained frustratingly quiet. That LP was far more techno than house, drawing on minimal's weirder tendencies and the cloudy sonics of Basic Channel. Its official followup (we're discounting the zonked-out Deep Breakfast mixtape), appearing on Anthony Naples' Proibito imprint, similarly delights in radiant mid-hi frequency texturing, but this time Cesear uses the looser grooves of house as his starting point.
"Yep" takes the EP's titular Leonard Cohen lyric rather literally. Its single gauzy sample loop is little more than a smudge of light at the opening; Cesear painstakingly widens the space over three and a half minutes until we can discern the outline of a sleepy slow-house groove. But just as we think a kick drum's going to enter and propel us into the bliss-o-sphere, we're plunged back into darkness. "Slink" is an equally exquisite exercise in withheld gratification, and its sepia-toned piano sample, serenely at odds with the four-square percussion, lends it a sense of befuddled weightlessness. "1 Year," finally, deploys a more fulsome dance floor arrangement—a bassline, a stolid house shuffle, rich sampled chords—but feels oddly overbalanced as a result. Cesear, it seems, thrives when he keeps things simple.
TracklistA1 Yep
A2 Slink
B 1 Year