Bleep

This album features in the top ten albums of 2013

London’s landmark club Fabric pushed their label Houndstooth from strength to strength in 2013, with Paul Woolford’s album as Special Request being an outstanding highlight. With remixes from a list of brilliant and varied artists including Lee Gamble, Anthony Shakir, Kassem Mosse, Heiroglyphic Being and Anthony Naples, Soul Music traverses jungle and techno influences with an invention that nonetheless pays its dues to classic dance music forms.

‘Ride VIP’ renders a jungle breakbeat and siren strangely cold and sleek, much more in the vein of European techno, while ‘Soundboy Killer’ is a rough jungle slammer with more classic chopped up incendiary vocals. ‘Broken Dreams’ collides a Drexciya bass line with vintage drum & bass to provide a re-contextualisation of these two rarely combined genres, and ‘Mindwash’ takes the combination further, with a chugging ring-modulated synth line wobbling through the breakbeat maze.

Of the remixes, Lee Gamble’s take on ‘Capsules’ impresses most, making an elegiac haze from Woolford’s jungle armoury which is utterly beguiling, while Heiroglyphic Being and Kassem Mosse’s takes on ‘Deflowered’ provide an interesting take on where blunted house music of the highest order might push UK breakbeat tropes. Soul Music all in all is a compelling and comprehensive listen which touches on the year’s most vital waves of dance music.