- Since 2012, Andrea Mancini, a Luxembourg-born artist who splits his time between Berlin and Brussels, has made synthy house under the name Cleveland. His earliest records leaned into deep house traditions, but the music has become more lush and stylistically loose over the years. For his third release, Mancini debuts on Hivern Discs with three lengthy originals that emphasize atmosphere and crisp drum work. You can hear the young producer growing bolder with his craft in "Shine"'s thick melodic sprawl and gated snares, or in how "Atlas" spends five and a half minutes building to an understated climax. The way "Mercury" blends rolling broken beats with early synth-pop's starry timbres and motorik tension speaks to an artist wriggling free from genre constraints.
Listen close to Atlas and you can pick out detail after tiny detail—droning micro samples, bursts of percussive flair, distant mood tones, rhythmic nuances. And yet it doesn't feel right to call these tracks "painstakingly produced." Each layer sounds like a natural part of Mancini's patient process, not a superfluous add-on covering for a lack of ideas. Remove a pattern of muffled claps at the wrong time and "Shine" loses its light-footed momentum; if not for the constant twinkle in the background of "Mercury" the mix wouldn't get you so thoroughly buzzed. Most importantly, Mancini arranges every sound and movement to work in fluid harmony, gently lifting dance floors off the ground before they realize they're floating.
TracklistA1 Shine
A2 Mercury
B1 Atlas