Bleep

Two years on from 2015’s Late Night Endless, the ubiquitous Adrian Sherwood and Tectonic labelhead Rob Ellis AKA Pinch reconvened for round two of their dark echo dek collaborations with Man Vs. Sofa. The album sees the duo successfully merging their respective labels’ aesthetics once again: the multidimensional dub of Sherwoods’s On-U Sound dovetails with the drum excellence of Pinch’s Tectonic, with several guests inflicting their own flair on the versatile tracklist.

Lots of surprises hide in these tracks as elements of Sherwood’s dub production emerge contorted from murky waters. The duskily sombre pianos and slappy guitars of his On-U cohort contrast against the stabbing beats and depth charge bass that Pinch provides in spades. The shattered atmosphere of ‘Man Vs. Sofa’ is reminiscent of the glitchy ambient dub experiments of Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, perhaps unsurprising given their cover of the iconic ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’, hinting at influences even further afield of the reggaesphere as they reconfigure the song into wondrous scenes of crackling drums and echo magic.

‘Lies’ sees the delay and reverb processed voice of dub legend Lee “Scratch” Perry bridge this inimitable release with its 1960s roots amidst rebounding hand drums and warm gushes of sax, whereas Primal Scream’s Martin Duffy, Def Jam’s Taz and Skip McDonald from The Sugarhill Gang account for a wider scope of associated genres. The result is a diverse full length, juxtaposing squeaking and gnarling synth experiments (‘Unlearn’) with agitated, unrepenting grime (‘Gun Law’) and the eeriness of dissonance combined with hard hitting percussion (‘Roll Call’), showing the duo at their most mutable.

Two legends of bass music combine forces, and out comes both a history lesson and flashforward of a record with Sherwood & Pinch’s Man Vs. Sofa.