- Timeless UK garage blended with deep house, laced with soul and an outer-space twist.
- "When making music, I like to envision myself driving," Cameron Phillips, AKA DJ Perception, told me over a recent email exchange. The UK garage legend, whose name has become synonymous with slick 2-step, house and grime over the years, was referring to rides in his Volkswagen MK3 Golf GTI. For his debut album, Journey To The Star, he embraced a more otherworldly definition of driving. Inspired by Afrofuturist conceptions of space exploration, this stunning LP of UK garage and New York deep house is meant to represent an audio flight log of an imaginary odyssey across galaxies. But instead of geographical data, Journey To The Star transmits lustrous, jazz-influenced grooves, velvety tones and intuitive chord progressions with a crystal-clear signal, raising the bar for today's UK garage in the process.
Just like a spacecraft shuttling passengers to distant dimensions, the eight tracks on Journey To The Star transport listeners to a flow state—that precious feeling of peak performance in which all distractions dissipate. The Moodswing label boss says he was in a flow state when making the album, so it feels only natural that he'd want to pass that onto his audience. "There was very much a sense of tapping into a wider energy," he told RA. "Having a lot of influences, I often can't even say where the ideas come from, they just seem to flow out," he continued. This creative process, he describes, is "super Afrofuturist, since a lot of pioneers in different genres never set out specifically to create, but rather, felt some pull or drive to do so."
Just like DJ Q, another heavy-hitter in the world of UK garage and its progeny, Philips cross-pollinates various genres into his take on the style. Captivating from start to finish, Journey To The Star is packed with deep house, dub and soul influences, complementing UK garage's signature rolling basslines and tightly-wound drums. "I wanted to explore a range of different rhythms that would still sound like UK garage while also expanding on the rhythms that you'd typically hear," Philips said. "Jupiter's Lullaby," "Sunlight" and "History" boast the most house influences, featuring interludes of glassy, seemingly translucent melodies against swung beats, creating the perfect balance between light and heavy textures. "Darkside" and "Space Yardie" lean more towards dub and broken beat, incorporating low-pitched frequencies, thudding bass weight and menacing synth lines. The title track borrows heavily from percussive techno with its layered hi-hats and polyrhythmic drum loops.
As a DJ and producer, the South London artist has long been a purveyor of classy UK garage. His debut album could very well be the genre's dictionary definition thanks to its lustrous, high-definition production, lending it a classic, timeless feel. This ageless quality makes Journey To The Star, described in the liner notes as an LP "built four millennia in the future," a perfect fit for Timehri. The label takes its name from the Guyanese-Amerindian word for a petroglyph, an ancient symbol that's passed down the cultural beliefs of older civilisations for centuries. Similarly, Journey To The Star will be communicating the essence of UK garage to many future generations down the line.
Tracklist01. Highline
02. Asteroid Field
03. Journey To The Star
04. Darkside
05. Sunlight
06. Jupiter's Lullaby
07. Space Yardie
08. History feat. MC Wizkid