- If you've come across Lee Bannon's "dark and angry" Dedekind Cut debut, and Rabit's harrowing full-length for Tri Angle, then you'd naturally brace yourself before diving into R&D. Communion was a brutal record that bludgeoned and bled, while Thot Enhancer served up Bannon's jungle and ambient in mangled forms. The two artists coming together isn't a shock, but in the case of their first collaboration, R&D feels more like a friction than a fusion of personalities.
These tracks are short, sketchy and deliberately disruptive. Take "R&D-ii": it swoops in on a choral cloud and patters along like gentle rainfall before fading out completely. Total silence reigns for a few seconds, then the track launches into a nightmarish, high-speed mash-up of seemingly whatever the pair could lay their hands on. It's a minute of total hell, like they tossed two individual productions into a wood chipper and recorded the shards as they were spat out. And then it's over. "R&D-iii" pick things up from there, bursting out of the stocks and into one of Dedekind Cut's breakcore beat-downs, before relenting to a caustic, deconstructed grime style that sounds more like Rabit.
This sense of passing the baton continues on "R&D-iv," which eventually settles into an emotive jungle sound, with a vocal sample giving it some needed backbone. It's the first track with any tangible structure, but it still seems crude. Both artists have released music that sounds half-baked or incomplete, and R&D again appears to be lifted straight from the drawing board.
Tracklist01. R&D-i
02. R&D-ii
03. R&D-iii
04. R&D-iv