Bloom - Hydraulics

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  • Bloom has always displayed the urge to break things. His breakthrough single "Quartz" was grime shattered like a pane of glass, its forms rendered (even more) fractured and angular. Even by his standards, though, Hydraulics is tough-going. As its title suggests, the EP is best understood as the sound of heavy machinery dancing; whirrs, bleeps and punishing metallic concussions marshalled into obtuse rhythmic forms. It's not exactly an unfamiliar sound palette these days, with young grime producers exploring ever more alien sonics and the metallic textures of Jam City's Classical Curves looming large. But in pushing this conceit so far, Bloom transcends this context. If anything, his cryptic rhythms and lacerating percussion bring to mind the algorithmic workouts of Autechre. As with that Warp twosome, the best tracks here are poised on a knife-edge between knotty abstraction and a sly, buried funk (though in this case, of course, the template is not hip-hop but grime). "Cold Grip" and "The Menagerie" are the most successful in this regard, the former's enormous squarewave bassline marking a neat line of continuity with Bloom's past work. Elsewhere, however, the momentum sags. The way "Dark Light"'s slinky groove soon disintegrates in a squall of twisted metal is very satisfying, but from that point on it's a case of diminishing returns. "Vessel"'s opening gasped breaths, meanwhile, suggest an injection of very human urgency, but ultimately we get the opposite: a sparse, inhuman racket, impressive but rather unaffecting.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Cold Grip A2 The Menagerie B1 Dark Light B2 Vessel
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