Adiel - (What You Want) Is Music EP

23 Jul

Adiel has warmed to the Spazio Disponibile imprint like an incandescent heat lamp, showing a complete understanding and deliberate reinterpretation of their musical ethos. From the record's outset, there's something different about Adiel's production as she incorporates new genre conventions and deliberately rejects the musical signifiers we are used to. (What You Want) Is Music EP is a foray into unhinged experiments designed to push the boundaries of what the Spazio Disponibile label sounds like.

'(What You Want) Is Music' is a wacky conglomerate of dub reggae, deep electro, and futile Japanese flutes, but somehow, it works. Throughout, Adiel relies on these heavy dubbed-out drums that lay a wall of thick subfrequency. It's not quite a kick or a bass in the conventional sense, more like a pulsating wall of sound that acts as the rhythmic cue for the rest of the percussion. The low-end experimentation continues throughout, but it's in the track 'Inari Dreaming' that the dubstep undercurrents become known. This time, Adiel slows down that pulsation, giving more breathing room between 808s, leaving plenty of room for an upbeat melody that is shrouded in ice-cold effects, the combination of which feels like when the resonance cranks, shards of glass like ice are skimming across a frozen lake, their sound dissipating as they reach the horizon of your vision.

Adielis's tricks don't stop there. On 'Rehang', playful, bouncy synthesises lure you into a rhythmic trip full of perfectly positioned percussive licks. The (What You Want) Is Music EP is the furthest I've heard the Spazio Disponibile label venture into the left field and incorporate so much iconography from different genres. 'Rehang' is a relatively placid tune compared to the rest of Adiel's offering on the record. However, that didn't stop her from exploring glitch and dark halftime D&B, ultimately adding to the imprint's sound palette. The dubstep undercurrents return on the closer 'To Bryn' as it's the closest she comes to fully replicating the dank and dirty. 'To Bryn' is drenched in a thick atmosphere, with a poignant vocal sample and a shedload of tension. Adiel effectively pulls a fast one by rejecting whatever she thinks she will do. There's no drop, no aggressive bass synth. Instead, we have a slow-burning, methodical track riddled with impressive sound design that blends elements flawlessly into this tsunami of subtle texture and rippling air pressure. Adiel now holds the crown for the most adventurous output by the Donato Dozzy and Neel's label. Still, it is also what the experimental techno label needs: more bombastic adventures that flip genre expectations on their head to push the label forward.

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