Bleep

Italian sound explorer Herva follows up 2015's Kila with another genre-defying album for Planet Mu, his second for Mike Paradina's imprint. Unlike his previous releases for labels like Delsin and Don't Be Afraid, Hyper Flux sees the Florence-based producer experiment with "real" instruments, taking guitars and weird acoustic devices built by his dad as a starting point.

Herva’s handling of these instruments, which he manipulates with a range of effects and combines with field recordings and FM synthesis, demonstrates his unique perspective as a producer. While his frantic rhythms wouldn’t pass as the most easily accessible, they often disappear in a haze of swept up sounds, adding a warm and welcoming touch – exemplified in the pearlescent mallets counterbalancing ‘Jitter’s’ splintered beat, down-pitched vocal samples and gnarling guitars. Whereas the weirdness reaches its height with the down-tempo collage of ‘Meta Wave’, sounding like the inside of a mutating clockwork, the overdriven kicks of ‘Nasty MF’ and the dub-y meanderings of ‘Lly Spirals’ bridge the album with Herva’s dance-floor output. With idiosyncrasy constituting one of Planet Mu’s core values, his unusual approach makes him fit seamlessly into the seminal label’s roster.