- Razor-edged experimental reggaeton from Cardopusher's new alias.
- In a review of Cardopusher's Muscle Memory EP from 2018, RA editor Andrew Ryce says that the Barcelona-based producer could "probably make fun dance music in any style." While at the time, Cardopusher had already been working between techno, EBM, acid and industrial, there was no way to predict just how flexible he could really become.
Under his new alias Safety Trance, Luis Garban applies his heavy-duty sensibilities to the classic reggaeton he grew up with in Caracas. Compared to his recent output as Cardopusher, Safety Trance's palette is strikingly maximalist, and more digital. It's characterised by slinking synth hooks, cut up dembow loops and rapid-fire samples that fly at you from multiple directions—an aesthetic he honed while working on Arca's KiCK series. Garban officially ushered in Safety Trance with Noches de Terror for Boysnoize Records in July. Where that EP leaned heavily on industrial-reggaeton hybrids, his new one, Lágrimas, feels like the true arrival of the Safety Trance sound, with each of its eight tracks flexing just how many directions he can stretch reggaeton's trademark sounds in.
Lágrimas begins, appropriately, with an explosion of hyperreal organic textures and crashing beats that sounds like a grenade being tossed into the centre of a reggaeton sound pack. From here, he reassembles the fallout into different structures. On "X Cantidad," he and Brodinski craft ominous grime, arriving at a vibe that sounds like a dembow-injected Rabit track, and with "Caracas Bubblin Militia," he ratchets up the pace in line with the turbo-charged Dutch genre while drawing a connection to Caracas' own homegrown changa tuki sound. Later on the tape he carves out space for a searing verse from Manchester's Iceboy Violet, bending witch house synths and overdriven trap beats around their strained vocals.
This all comes together into a record that feels like a purposeful antidote to popular reggaeton's increasingly polished sound. On "Tusi En El Pussy," Argentinian neoperreo artist DJ Sustancia raps about the popular street drug tusi—which, while deceptively named after the synthetic psychedelic 2C-B, is actually a thrown-together cocktail of MDMA, ketamine, other synthetics and (sometimes) opiates, dyed bright pink (for flair). While completely unpredictable and potentially lethal, there's an allure to the way the flamboyantly-colored powder wears its impurity proudly—one that's mimicked in Lágrimas. Here, reggaeton has been cut and diluted by a myriad of influences, repackaged as something more sleek, more modern and much more dangerous.
Tracklist01. AAEFXX
02. Ratatata feat. Virgen Maria
03. Miserable
04. Tusi En El Pussy feat. DJ Sustancia
05. Caracas Bubblin Militia
06. Save Me feat. Iceboy Violet
07. Destrucción
08. X Cantidad feat. Brodinski