- Dreamy, nostalgic house music thick with summer heat.
- Discogs' recommendation algorithm is famously bad—"So much as glance at a house record on discogs and you get recommended this tune," said one user about Andrés's "New For U"—but sometimes it gets things about right. If you wound up on the release page for SJ Tequilla's Conditionel, for instance, it advises you to check out music from DJ Sotofett, SVN, DJ Fett Burger and Pender Street Steppers (and, of course, Andrés). This Berlin-based Japanese artist, real name Naota Matsuda, has plenty of common ground with those artists, sharing a love for hazy house music made on hardware, dreamy moods and a casual outsider attitude. He's released a small handful of records in recent years— Conditionel came out on Fett Burger and Jayda G's Freakout Cult—and he now joins the ranks of Craigie Knowes, the in-form Glasgow label that's dropping around a record per month at the moment.
Matsuda's style of unapologetically past-facing music fits well with Craigie Knowes, whose releases seem to implicitly suggest that there's still plenty to be said with classic formulas. "Sanya" feels like the result of an artistic process that began with Matsuda imagining Ibiza in 1989. It's a house track replete with summer heat and the nagging feeling that things were better before. "Deolta" transposes those sensations to an ambient context, with the gentle roll of toms providing a rhythmic frame.
Flipping the record reveals another house and ambient double act, with "Sweet Salts 2" exploring the chilled end of acidic house and "The Day After" sidelining beats in favour of deep bass and spiralling synthesisers. Nothing here quite stands out in the way earlier tracks like "Drift" and "Sweet Salt" did—as Matsuda looks to the past, you might be better off exploring his recording history, if you haven't already.
TracklistA1 Sanya
A2 Deolta
B1 Sweet Salts 2
B2 The Day After