- Laid-back deep house at its most musical.
- Cutting Shapes is an appropriate title for Malik Hendricks' second EP. He approaches dance music like a sculptor, smoothing edges, trimming frequencies and carving out ornamental synth melodies to make soulful deep house and techno. His tools of the trade are bold hand percussion, sparkling keys and funky guitar riffs, putting him in a lineage of deep house producers from across the Midwest and East Coast who incorporate live instrumentation into their productions. He's been a DJ for over decade, and though he only started releasing music a couple years ago, you can hear his respect and reverence for classic house music on Cutting Shapes.
On "D.W.E.L.E," Hendricks fuses musical worlds, blurring the boundaries between Detroit dub techno and smooth Chicago house, even adding the Brazilian rhythms of embolada (played on a pandeiro, a type of hand drum), offering another take on house's typical kick drum thump. There's a similar sleight of hand on the title track, where Hendricks plays the keys with an exquisite touch, alongside chopped vocal grunts and playful handclaps. These jumpy, percussive accents lend a strange but intuitive groove to the track's otherwise four-to-the-floor pulse.
Hendricks' touch with instrumentation brings a real warmth to his music, like on the slick "Dance To The Music," where dextrous Rhodes playing and jazzy guitar licks frame a brief, compelling discourse about Black music. The opening track, "Deeper Than," is the odd one out, a chill-out mood-setter that lacks the energy of the rest of the EP. That being said, the jazzy Byron The Aquarius version—which closes the record with lovely, Roy Ayers-inspired xylophone runs—perks it up a little. It's this taste for live instrumentation that makes Cutting Shapes feel refined, powerful and sometimes even soothing, encapsulating everything wonderful about American deep house and adding to the tradition in the process.
Tracklist01. Deeper Than feat. Tane
02. Cutting Shapes
03. D.W.E.L.E.
04. Dance To The Music
05. Deeper Than feat. Tane (Byron The Aquarius Late Nite Mix)