Photonz - No Fear

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  • As fans of Dissident are undoubtedly familiar with by now, their second offering from Photonz is a one-sided 12-inch, printed in two hundred copies and listed with a "no repress!" tag. And like most of the label's catalog, "No Fear" would be a solid acquisition even if it wasn't the subject of a tantalizingly-small print run. It's a spiraling, hydra-headed Detroit-style jam whose most valuable asset is its unpredictability. There's not a straight bar of eight beats throughout the whole thing—just as the ears and the body have locked into the 808 groove, it jerks out from under you, stubbornly refusing to settle, instead sidewinding through a mildly hyperactive workout, making pit-stops among stiffly arpeggiated bass samples and bursts of synth-pads, finally dead-ending in an echoey cluster of percussive white noise. It's memorable more for the effect of its overall structure and flow rather than any particular riff or standout sound. Photonz are no strangers to classic dance music—"Shaboo," their previous Dissident single, revisited early '90s feel-good house, and wouldn't be easily distinguishable from its ancestors if put to a blind taste test. With "No Fear," instead of merely aping the past, or grafting strands of it onto the present, Photonz have gone and mulched up a good chunk of it in a blender. The tune sounds like the result of some Frankensteinian megamix, where deep in their lab outside of Lisbon, the duo have transformed a heap of disembodied sonic fragments into a hoary, undead Kevin Saunderson joint. As such it's a good history lesson, both in style and in name: No fear of returning to the classics, and then no fear of tearing them apart.
  • Tracklist
      A No Fear
RA