- Dubsteppy bass science meets trance euphoria.
- Lucy Hopson, AKA LUXE, teased the track "Peach Fuzz" in her all-originals Crack mix from last year. "Peach Fuzz" transitions from the bass-heavy steppers of the opening suite into the lighter progressive-leaning sounds that she canes in the back half. It's a breathtaking moment where the heft and empty space of dubstep's low-end is married with the breathy vocals and wobbly synths of progressive. Now the track gets a proper release on Mineral And Moss, where Hopson hones her strange club hybrids that sound a bit like coming down from Gatecrashers with a spliff at FWD.
Across Mineral And Moss, Hopson exorcises the ghosts of dance music past. Both "A Team" and "Rocket Girl" pair dubstep-esque basslines with melodies that reach for eccied euphoria—when "A Team" hits its stride, it's as hands-in-the-air as they come. "Filaments" is a bit straighter, closer to Fever AM-style techno with its spider web-like arpeggio hanging over the dark basement of bass and rolling hand drums, but I'm tempted to call "Pixie Swamp" minimal prog. Although I doubt the genre will have its own Beatport chart any time soon, this track could be the blueprint: careening along at 160 BPM the stereo field is spartan, less the sort of robotic bleeps Zip likes to play.
For any one following "the discourse" online, Mineral And Moss feels like a pointed rebuke to a piece this month in The New Statesman (of all places) celebrating the death of techno and the rise of trance. While the piece is cookie cutter clickbait, what's frustrating is that it describes Fred again.. and Calvin Harris as leading the charge of this trance revival. The history of dance music is a history of erasing marginalized voices. This is yet another example, gentrifying the fact that the current trance revival has come from the queer underground, including labels like D. Tiffany's Planet Euphorique. Mineral And Moss underlines that the underground is still strong. Let them have their Calvin Harris when you've got someone like Hopson fusing trance with dubstep.
Tracklist01. A Team
02. Rocket Girl
03. Filaments
04. Peach Fuzz
05. Pixie Swamp