- Old-school house meets contemporary club music on this new EP from an exceptional Australian label.
- Melbourne has always been a hotspot for groovy, often genre-agnostic club music, and with Animalia, the city has a new standard-bearer for its most exciting sounds. Starting out as a stellar mix series and party brand, releasing its first compilation in 2020, in just four records since, the label has become a cop-on-sight outift. Shifting Sands, from Billus, is no exception to the rule. It's a wonderful blend of old-school house sounds with 2022 club kid aesthetics.
To illustrate that point, I'd point to "Cubic," which pairs a bouncy broken beat with chilled-out chord vamps that hint at early Chicago house. But it's lush and shimmery like prog house, with an elegant feeling of constant ascension that ends with a mist of chimes. "Under The Company," meanwhile, sounds like '90s UK ambient techno mixed with Gemini: breezy pads paired with skittering, fidgety percussion. Or check the lolling chords of the title track, and its deceptively intricate rhythm section: minuscule snares that create the illusion of a broken house track held together with sellotape. And the soothing bassline sounds like it's digging a tunnel underneath it all.
Billus's basslines are a major attraction here. They're mostly in the lowest reaches of the low end, which gives them a tectonic feeling without ever becoming overbearing. The best is probably on "Splay," where the bass zigzags around like a Shackleton track, but that's the only thing close to a comparison. The rest of the track—its trance-inflected wash of a synth lead, the dusty piano, the exquisite reverb on the drums—begins to sound a whole lot like a Billus signature, which is an impressive thing to accomplish on a four-track EP.
TracklistA1 Shifting Sounds
A2 Splay
B1 Cubic
B2 Under The Canopy