- Brutalist dance floor structures.
- Rian Treanor pulls on his racing gloves and gets behind the wheel of a custom car that looks more like a rocket ship, preparing to peel down the Nevada Salt Flats. Treanor, known for making speedy, experimental club music using Max/MSP, is not attempting to break the land speed record, but the first single off the UK artist's forthcoming second album, File Under UK Metaplasm, is possessed with the same daredevil spirit.
"I'm still focused on making functioning dance music for clubs, but I'm really interested in how far you push that before it's just like—no," says Treanor in the press release for the LP, but this isn't extremism for the sake of it. After an appearance at Uganda's Nyege Nyege festival, he spent a month at the collective's studio in Kampala, absorbing the hectic rhythms of the musicians he was working alongside, like Tanzania's Jay Mitta and Sisso. At a club night in town, he played a pitched-up Jlin track, the crowd heaving appreciatively at nearly 200 BPM.
This experience has now permeated Treanor's style. You can hear it in "Hypnic Jerks'" lightning-speed cowbell patterns, programmed at a combustible 180 BPM. Blast beats threaten to push things over the edge while a lead synth that sounds like sneakers on a basketball court builds tension in a slow ascent up and down the scale. The rawness is the product of an imaginative palette. The depth and tidiness of the mix and razor-sharp programming we've come to expect from Treanor are very much present. However, "Hypnic Jerks" pairs Treanor's programming nous with a thrilling sense of abandon, a renewed need for speed.
Tracklist01. Hypnic Jerks