Bleep

Ever since emerging onto the scene, Jim Coles has been a key player both in UK bass and British electronic music at large. His 2000s output as 2tall, the founding of Cosmic Bridge in 2011, and his many Acid Dub Studies in the 2020s have made him a household name, and it was his debut as Om Unit that ignited his longest running and most celebrated alias of today. Reminiscing on ten years since its release, Coles drops a remastered edition of the scintillating Threads.

By Coles’ own admission, Threads was a challenge: both to himself and the music world. He pushed the limits of dubstep, jungle, and techno into a sprawling mixture that still sounds like little else. Future facing synths growl, shimmer, and intensify across a halftime beat on ‘Folding Shadows’, dreamy with his signature sonic fog yet movement inducing, with hints of acid squelches that would define his work years later. The oscillating monologue of ‘Drift Interlude’ adds atmospheric insight into these colliding sounds and scenes, leading to the building layers of filtered synths and junglist drum fills on ‘Reverse Logic’, where streetlights stream by in a dub techno haze.

Not only does Coles have an ear for sound design but for collaborators too: Jinadu executes vocal power and wispy melodies on ‘The Silence’, and MC Jabu “harvests real killer rhymes” on ‘Patients’ where biting verses give voice to anxious stabs. Concrete splashes and jazzy infusions switch out for enigmatic ney flute winds on ‘Healing Rain’, meanwhile ‘Corridor 2013’ rinses a grimy bassline and clobbering beat with fountainous synths and vocals. String plucks echo into the rumbling fire of ‘The Road’, an epic closer highlighting Charlie Dark’s spoken word ode to the harsh travels of life’s journeys.

Many of Om Unit’s experiments lining our shelves today find their origins in Threads, making it an essential entry in the UK bass continuum.