- Incredible sound design with soul.
- BFTT's debut album begins with a sharp sound that brings to mind a solar lens flare reflecting off a slab of gleaming chrome. It's a brief, fleeting moment that immediately catches the ear, a sign of what's to come: inhuman but evocative sounds, iridescent and metallic. (Think early Objekt, or Classical Curves-era Jam City.) Over the course of 35 jaw-dropping minutes, the Manchester artist constructs a world from the ground-up using these sounds, pulling material apart and recombining it at will, moving from scaffolding to completion and back again. Frequency bands swell and then narrow, disappearing back into the abyss, as snatches of vocal ring out like SOS signals from another dimension. Occasionally these sounds collect into discernible rhythms, making for some of the most three-dimensional, spine-tingling club music this side of "The Stitch-Up."
The first time a beat lands on Redefines—in the second track, "Ydont"—it feels momentous, as the bucking basslines and trebly drum hits careen across the stereo spectrum like an out of control factory robot arm. It's a tour de force of intricate sound design and in-the-box arrangement. The whole track seems to rotate on its axis, turning upside-down and inverting itself while those drums spin around your head. This is a favorite device of BFTT's. The tom-toms on "feelins2" are purposefully disorienting, with the melodies tumbling out around it like colliding marbles. The percussion on the incredible "Disp" triggers strange, dubby effects on the elements around it, as if each hit was interrupting the simulation, altering the fabric of your reality.
Redefines was created from a mix of YouTube rips and handheld phone recordings, which makes it all the more impressive. Those sounds are processed into pure, luminous texture, and the only recognizable elements left are those snippets of speech that act like unnerving signposts of a more familiar world. But while BFTT's soundstage is spartan and antiseptic, it hardly lacks emotion: "Suchblush (surreptitious mix)" drifts on glacial chords that have an '80s Eno majesty to them, while the closer "Apple TV" is calm and serene—evidently a recording of real, actual strings, pockmarked only by the persistent rattling of BFTT's weirdo drum sounds.
These tracks make Redefines feel whole, not just a virtuosic display of mind-boggling, teeth-rattling club sound design but also something soulful and deliberate, capturing some of the stronger feelings and melodies you'd hear in his DJ sets. The LP descends into deep, slow passages only to snap back into the skeletal rhythms, with a rich and dynamic sequencing that makes the contrasts pop even more.
No matter how many times I've listened to Redefines—and I've listened to it a lot—I can never get over the feeling when the LP finally slips into "Rezalemess," a squeaky, high-pitched club banger that sounds like it's stretching the quantized grid to the limit, like pulling on an elastic so hard you can almost feel the fibres start to snap in your hands. It struts and swings, full of disembodied vocal hooks that leap across the churning drums below. It's complex and dizzying music, but it operates on pure, intuitive understanding—catchy melody, danceable rhythm—and just when you've finally latched onto it, BFTT has already moved onto his next, casually brilliant idea.
Tracklist01. BM-15
02. Ydont
03. feelins2
04. Suchblush (surreptitious mix)
05. Rezalemass
06. Disp
07. Apple TV