- Untold's sound has always been difficult to parse. Sure, you can pick out the influences—classic grime, early jungle, 'ardkore—but the way he collapses them into hermetically sealed boxes is disarmingly oblique. The last year has seen him strip his music almost uncomfortably bare, culminating in Gonna Work Out Fine, one of the most clinical and challenging things to ever come out of UK bass music. Maybe he's gotten it out of his system, then? His first release for R&S—fitting well into a continuing line of colourful releases for the label—sounds positively maximal next to something like Fine.
If his memorable twitter links to classic plates on YouTube weren't enough to tell you, Jack Dunning likes jungle, and "Stereo Freeze" is possibly his most transparent paean yet. The first thing that's apparent is the rumbling, queasy sub-bass: breathy hats and anxious snares clamor before the song's main melody drops over gut-punching kicks. The litany of simultaneous ascending melodies buzz and hiss like an angry hornet's nest, the panicked motion of someone desperately swinging at a particularly nimble flying insect. It's oddly sublime, overwhelming, as the song takes on a life of its own, feeding on its own infinite energy in the most junglist of ways.
"Mass Dreams of the Future" is the exhausted aftermath of "Stereo Freeze" played in reverse: the melody stumbles down a steep staircase, too fatigued to muster up the same kind of awe-inspiring strength. The track is occasionally buoyed by a monotone piano that detachedly rings out like it did in "Palamino," only now it's treading in a pool of reverb much like the rest of this EP. His tracks are no longer dry skeletons but breathing, quivering creatures, and there's just as much to love in their newfound health as there was in their former austerity.
Tracklist A Stereo Freeze
B Mass Dreams Of The Future