- The experimental duo get outstanding results from the "weightless" sound.
- UK artists have been hollowing out grime for the better part of a decade, yet they're still finding new angles. Mumdance and Logos have found particular success, calling their sound "weightless" and starting the Different Circles label around that concept. Raime are the latest to tackle weightless, and they do it with the precision that marks all their work. The duo turn their hefty sound inside-out, focusing on needlepoint samples, grime melodies and hyperactive arrangements, making something that could have only come from them. Am I Using Content Or Is Content Using Me?, among the most creative records to emerge from the experimental club scene this year, is a new angle from a duo who already had their sound down to a science.
The claustrophobic feel of Raime's past music is gone, replaced by a new sense of space on tracks like "Some Things Can Happen, Just Like This" and "Our Valleys Are Always Uncanny." Where silence in Raime's music once felt suffocating, here it's liberating. Those two tracks rebuild the sounds of weightless grime in Raime's image: bright synths and implacable samples are paired with the duo's trademark vocal gasps and bass bombs, along with MC chatter and other snippets of sound. It's even more dizzyingly referential than Raime's old records, but also more open-ended. Though you'll recognize the typical melodic scales of grime tracks, you've probably never heard them arranged like this.
Raime speed up their rhythms to a nervous stutter on "The Nourishment Cycle," which hints at the dark garage of acts like Horsepower Productions and early Shackleton. Think tribal music from another planet. The dizzy "Real People, Not Actors" hinges on a mallet lead that morphs, sidesteps and disappears every few bars, peppered by guttural vocal sounds, strings and the vaguest hint of drums. In four minutes, "Real People, Not Actors" seems to change shape at least ten times, but there's a path to follow through its topsy-turvy arrangements. It's something made from old building blocks that feels new, just as Raime have done since their first release.
TracklistA1 Some Things Can Happen, Just Like This
A2 Our Valleys Are Always Uncanny
B1 The Nourishment Cycle
B2 Real People, Not Actors