Bleep

Distilling the sounds of South London into a solid hour’s worth of dance and jazz fusions, Joe Armon-Jones and Maxwell Owin follow up their 2017 mini album Idiom with a full length of magnificent proportion. Built over the course of six years, Archetype finds its home on Armon-Jones’ Aquarii label, coming full circle from his collaborative debut with updated sensibilities and a veritable who’s who of the South London underground scene.

Owin cites the hardcore continuum, making sure every beat is crisp and cuts through the mix in a visceral fashion, while Armon-Jones handles keys and bass with poise and power. Tracks like ‘Don’t Tip Me Over’ showcase the duo’s coalescence of sounds, with ghostly ambience slithering beneath strutting uppercuts of rhythm, while Fatima’s smooth, silky vocals add an R&B and neo soul slant to the tastefully ornamented strings and jaunty piano runs. The title track flows in with a similar ethereal atmosphere before snappy two step-ish beats, heavyweight bass wobbles, and deft rhymes from O the ghost tear through.

Amidst the features are swift verses from Lex Amor, processing ‘Grief’ over elegant pianos. Shabaka Hutchings’ fluent bass clarinet merges effortlessly with a grimy liquid bass on ‘Rago’s Garage’, and ‘Ikigai’ is a slow and considered roundup of expert instrumentalists, with glistening jewels of harp, digitally manipulated gusts of flute, and subterranean dub subs. Elsewhere, metallic beats bring the tension in the high speed chase of ‘Lost In The Function’, and the dubstep epic of ‘Adrenaline/Oxygen’ bounces with sliced up and slicing beats, switching up with a propulsive four to the floor before guitar harmonics sen it into a blissed out fog.

Erupting with jazzy blossoms and molten low frequencies, Archetype cements over six years of fruitful collaboration between Joe Armon-Jones and Maxwell Owin.