- Mumdance and Logos are keen to point out that Different Circles goes beyond the instrumental grime world. The label's "weightless" style is about, as Mumdance put it, "moving away from conventional harmony and melody […] towards sonics, and space, and using silence." Nothing in the label's slight catalogue demonstrates this as well as Airhead's "Kazzt." For one thing, it's the first Different Circles record from an artist outside of that nebulous grime scene. For another, it's by some distance the most unconventional thing on the label, topping the (already substantial) weirdness of Airhead's 2014 Hemlock single.
On the first couple of listens you're flailing about for handholds. You won't find them in the jittery midrange clicks that pass for drums, nor the shrill synth squawks that pass for chords, nor the comedy FM squiggles that crosshatch the higher register, hunting for your tinnitus triggerpoint. If anything's going to make sense of it all, it's the low-end. In this respect, Airhead is still processing his formative experiences with dubstep: as with an old DMZ track, it takes a full-frequency soundsystem to really make sense of "Kazzt." Then you can start to notice how the clean, smooth sub tones delineate the structure, producing moments of pressure and release, swooping gut-wrenchingly up and down or climbing frantic stepladders under metronomic synth blips.
For his remix, Mumdance explores recent preoccupations: contrast and collision. As usual for him, the outcome borders on incoherent. As if the track's yawning silences and structural non-sequiturs weren't confusing enough, the main beat pattern switches between bars of 4/4 and 3/4. When it all comes together at the end, it's over a gabber-like kick that runs at double-speed to the stuff up top. Shortly before that, a woman can be heard saying, "You have to kind of like… see the… bigger picture." The Different Circles picture is starting to become clear.
TracklistA Kazzt
B Kazzt (Mumdance Remix)