- Shimmering club tracks that celebrate Black club music from both sides of the Atlantic.
- "Best16," the second track on Miami-based Suzi Analogue's Infinite Zonez, is a celebration and ode to Black electronic music. The track begins with a crackly hip-house loop somewhere between Galcher Lustwerk and Delroy Edwards before unleashing a jungle breakbeat. Just as quickly as she introduces her inner junglist, she drops down to half-time with a devastating trap crawl. Equally effective as both a miniature archive of Black electronic music and a club banger, "Best16" fits perfectly into Analogue's larger ethos. As she detailed in her RA Exchange last year, her work—as a producer and as the head of Never Normal Records—is to champion Black club music in its myriad forms. Infinite Zonez, a compilation that collects the best tracks from across her long running ZONEZ mixtape series, reshapes those traditions, from rave to techno to footwork, into luminescent party tracks that celebrate Black artistry.
You can hear the interplay between homage and innovation in her approach to footwork. It's like the inverted image of a Jana Rush album. Where Rush disassembles melody and rhythm into a petri dish of sub-bass, Analogue breaks footwork down but then builds it back up into gleaming fibreglass constructions with a distinct optimism. On "She's Gonna," for example, she works with RP Boo to make a footwork track that has the neon gloss of PC Music. A surprisingly gentle low-end duets with the cotton candy sugar rush of the melody. "Deserve Betta" is a footwork spiritual with a gentle piano line meandering under Opal Hoyt's scatting, p the uplift of a footwork spiritual. Closer to Baltimore club at 137 BPM, "Nnow Flexx," keeps footwork's rapid snare fills and bass pulses but adds jazzy house melodies.
Analogue constantly morphs her tracks into new constellations of brightness and buoyancy. The trap breakdown on "Wildflowrrs" is ferocious, but the spliced chime melody has the funk of Low End Theory beat science. The chords on "FSN8" are a bit eerie, but there is a taut zipper synthline that gives the track a touch of cuteness. And on album highlight, "Stay Ready/Ur Dreamz," her synth squiggles recall Perlon records fused with the brightness of SOPHIE. It's one of the freshest approaches to afterhours tunes I've heard all year.
The lyrics on "Stay Ready/Ur Dreamz" add to the afters feel with the lyrics pitched so low in the mix it's hard to tell whether she's saying "I am the girl of your dreams" or "I am not the girl of your dreams" against the swampy morass of footwork drums and synth twirls. This ambiguity seems purposeful and like a moment where the lyrics -in their conflicted state of desire - are mirroring the production and vice versa. It's a trick she reprises elsewhere, particularly on the excellent "NNO Apology." The track cuts off mid-syllable to echo its unapologetic fuck you lyrics.
This unapologetic feel speaks to Analogue's desire to build a world of Black music not defined in or through whiteness. As she told RA contributor Tajh Morris, "My goal is to truly educate about the queer Black contributions to music. So many things that have become popular in music have come from queer and Black identities. You can literally just go down the list and figure it out. But these people aren’t championed and talked about. So we;re making space now. We have the power. With our creative efforts to shed light and champion the people who are carrying on the spirit of it today." On a record that takes in so many genres of the Black diaspora, Analogue is doing this work of building a musical genealogy for a world of Black "totality." As the vocal chop on "Don't Clock Nn" has it, "You better get free."
Tracklist01. 2DEEP feat. Junglepussy
02. BEST 16
03. She's Gonna feat. RP Boo
04. NNO APOLOGY feat. Michael Millions
05. Stay Ready / Ur Dreamz
06. Deserve Betta feat. DJ Taye & Opal Hoyt
07. FSN8
08. Wildflowrr
09. Shine Nn Any Weather feat. NappyNappa
10. Don't Clock Nn
11. Nnow Flexx
12. Jump Rope Reprise
13. Nrgnrg