- When Recording 2 starts, you have no idea where it's going to go. The mellow bassline and eighth note hi-hat pattern betray no particular genre. Then we get a steam whistle, a lazy drum fill, and when the beat drops it's... hip-hop? Something like it, anyway. It's a boom-bap that would go nicely with rhymes from someone like Sensational. Roughly speaking, Recording 2, the second 12-inch from SVN and Porn Sword Tobacco, does for downtempo what Recording 1 - 4 did for house and techno: strips it down and spaces it out until it's almost unrecognizable. They've also thrown in a thumping club track for good measure.
If the rhythms are unexpected, the overall sound is classic PST and SVN. You've got the drums, earthy and unpolished, and then all the stuff floating around them, odd frequencies that swarm the beats like tiny insects. Loose and imperfect as they sound, the rhythms are artfully constructed—head-nodding is unavoidable. The A1, with its winding lead melody, is the more fleshed out of the two, but something about the A2—more subtle, more alien—gives it the edge for me. The house track on the B-side mixes things up nicely, its tinny breaks, smudged kicks and squiggly bassline floating in the same odd flotsam as the other two (and, for that matter, most of SVN's productions). Listen closely and its translucent layers seem to go on forever.
TracklistA1 Untitled 1
A2 Untitled 2
B1 Untitled 3