- Ambient club artists Pontiac Streator and Special Guest DJ team up for an intriguingly ravey album.
- As solo artists, Special Guest DJ and Pontiac Streator share an elusive quality, with music that always seems on the verge of resolving or locking into a rhythm, but never quite getting there. They've become two of the most alluring artists who run in the circles of leftfield ambient labels like West Mineral Ltd. and Motion Ward. Outside of his DJing career, Special Guest DJ runs the 3XL label and has put out music under a number of aliases, including uon and DJ Paradise. Pontiac Streator is harder to pin down, but albums like last year's Sone Glo underline an obsession with both lowercase ambient and club music. On very dark past, they team up for the first time as crimeboys and kick the subdued energy up a notch. Here, trip-hop and jungle grooves weave oblique patterns through dense layers of samples and effects, challenging ambient music's recent associations with marketable minimalism. They inject the otherwise withdrawn instrumentals with an edgy aesthetic and flippant attitude that harkens back to a more restless side of the genre that had its zenith in the dusty warehouses and muddy fields of '90s rave culture.
very dark past pays clear homage to artists including Burial and Vangelis, formative teenage favorites for Pontiac Streator and Special Guest DJ. While the latter influence is a bit understated, the dreary sounds of late-'00s UK dubstep are more obvious. “haunted tattoo” has an inescapable William Bevan vibe, with its rainy soundscaping and pitch-shifted R&B vocal chops. On “days go by,” a fluttering sample rests atop dreary drums and unearthly echoes. “deja entendu (dub)” is supported by ghostly melodies that call to mind Hyperdub’s more ethereal releases.
The LP also features several uncharacteristically ravey cuts. (You wouldn't necessarily know it from their productions, but Pontiac Streator and Special Guest DJ both rip behind the decks.) “sex and drugs” underlines washed out synth pads with a bottom-heavy breakbeat, while “holodeck blue” combines bleary horn chirps with a woody bassline and serpentine percussion. “trippin’” and “red shift” are both deceptively subtle, carried by fleeting, filtered drums that sometimes build a meaty backbone, and other times just add to the hazy atmosphere. This inventive drum programming nicely bridges very dark past's more rough-hewn textures with its more pretty moments.
It’s surprising that it took this long for crimeboys to form. According to a 2021 piece in XLR8R, Michigan-raised Special Guest DJ met his partner Exael on Tumblr while still in school, a relationship that connected Special Guest DJ with a handful of Kansas natives from the West Mineral Ltd crew early on—including Pontiac Streator. Both members have released on the same labels, and have done their fair share of time spinning at buzzy club nights like False Peak and Gig. very dark past plays like a soundtrack for the liveliest moments at these parties, a captivatingly freaky outlier within the context of two artists who are most associated with the chillout room.
Tracklist01. holodeck blue
02. revenge tastes good
03. trippin'
04. deja entendu (dub)
05. red shift
06. sex and drugs
07. haunted tattoo
08. days go by