- In for 2024: 2-steppy, bass-heavy proto-dubstep. This is Ciel and Dan Only's take on the pivotal sound.
- To many keen observers of the dance music bubble, the genre du jour is proto-dubstep: that short but crucial period when acts like Horsepower Productions started to crank up the LFO and put wobbly basslines under garage's increasingly skippy beats. You could say Aqua Hotel, Ciel and Dan Only's new EP as Cloudsteppers, is the Toronto duo's take on the sound—yet they sound nothing like proper revivalists such as the record label GD4YA, which often taps El-B, another originator of the sound. Instead, it feels as if Cloudsteppers tried to create the sound from a distant memory, or maybe just from reading about it.
Aqua Hotel features most of the genre's signifiers. Take "Ducksteps," which incorporates ringtones, spinbacks, an M1 organ and scratchy wobbles over a straightforward and bumpy beat, with a bassline straight out of Shanti Celeste's cookbook. Like the rest of the EP, it's very much of its time, and perfectly at home on Celeste and Gramrcy's Peach Discs—a label typically associated with technicolor, party-starting earworms than urban sullenness. With its four-to-the-floor drive, Aqua Hotel imagines an alternate history of the post-garage sound. Instead of heading for the dark corners of London's estates and outer neighborhoods, birthing grime and dubstep, it takes inspiration from the tech house scene down at Wiggle or Fabric.
It's not just the bouncy basslines. Each of these tracks defuses the rowdiness of the genre with friendly, lighthearted touches—the airy synths of the title track, or the cheery, seesawing lead in "TDG." On "Control," the only vocal track here, Eden Samara opts for blasé, understated coos, recalling the languor of Narcotic Syntax's "Electric Liquid." This serene strength, as Samara assures us she's "in control," could just as well describe the two producers. On Aqua Hotel, Cloudsteppers coolly pluck from sounds more associated with grime and dubstep to craft four summery garage bumpers, seizing a trendy style and making it distinctly theirs.
Tracklist01. Aqua Hotel
02. Control feat. Eden Samara
03. Duckstep
04. TDG