- UK beat science on Batu's excellent label.
- Ploy, AKA Sam Smith, has dialled his music down to the essentials. The London-based producer developed his craft in Bristol under the name Samuel before finding a new alias and relocating east to the capital. Earlier releases took his UK bass and tribal house leanings into experimental terrain, where groggy ambient and cyclic polyrhythms moved in the low hum of insect atmospherics or the dreamy echo of bird calls. The feverish pace of records like 2016's Iron Lungs and 2017's Unruly often felt less for dancing than contemplating.
Ramos strips back to a crisper and more functional style of techno while indulging Smith's penchant for percussion. The title track is an insistent six minutes of cut-ups and dissections of what sounds like a marching band. A three-pronged sample of human gasps repeats alongside the looped drum break, a clipped whistle and a rising synth tone. "Roy's Rolls" has less impact, deconstructing the percussion further by chopping snippets of snares to impossible speeds and drowning them in layers of sine waves. The result is claustrophobic.
TracklistA Ramos
B Roy's Rolls