- The Berlin-based artist finds transcendence in deconstructed club.
- On first listen, xin's debut album sounds like experimental club music. The beats are shattered, the textures are abrasive, the approach avant-garde. Once you zoom in, though, you realize Melts Into Love is a totally different beast. xin comes at dance music like a demolitionist, not deconstructing it so much as destroying it. These tracks are almost formless, as though boiled down to sludge. Where other artists make the loudest, most discordant club bangers they can, xin turns away from quantized beats to build the dance music equivalent of abstract sculpture. Recognisable sounds and ideas become ghostly and unnerving, like a shadow of themselves. The effect is mesmerizing.
Melts Into Love is a dense and dizzy album, though it rarely feels particularly heavy. Disarray is the name of the game. On "Myopia," burned-out drums flail over a choir of oohs and aahs. The bassline on "Crrrash!" seems taken from a techstep track on a skipping CD, an effect that gets even gnarlier on "Declared Denied." "Ffantom Contendt" could induce motion sickness.
This music always feels just out of reach, slipping beyond comprehension just when you think you've got a hold on it. It's also beautiful. Melts Into Love cushions its most disturbing tracks with choral ambient pieces. Tracks like "That There Is None" break up the overload of hectic passages, so the harshness never become tedious. The album offsets every burst of frenzied energy with a pillow of melody.
You might glean from the title that Melts Into Love is about emotion and fluidity. On the LP's best track, "Spent, Wasted And Saved," xin teams up with AYA (formerly LOFT), another master of sonic shapeshifting. What sounds like radio static is quickly sculpted into a microscopic rhythm. As the choir builds in the background, "Spent, Wasted And Saved" morphs into a raucous rave track, and then a white-hot wall of sound. Here, noisy club music isn't just catharsis—it's transcendence.
Tracklist01. All That Is Solid
02. Crrrash!
03. Real Frenzy
04. That There Is None
05. Myopia
06. Spent, Wasted And Saved feat. AYA
07. Declared Denied
08. Ffantom Contendt
09. Virtually Asocial
10. No Relief, No Perspective, No Vanishing Point