Fanu - Serendipity

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  • When Finnish artist Janne Hatula emailed me out of the blue to tell me about the latest album from his Fanu project—which I had honestly never heard of before—I wasn't sure what to expect, or whether I should even bother listening. Truth be told, it was a comparison to drum & bass legend Paradox that truly piqued my interest, and Serendipity turned out to be far from a chore to sit through. In fact, from my very first listen, I was riveted. That's because Serendipity isn't a usual record for 2011. While so much in the "bass music" world—be it drum & bass, dubstep or anything else—is obsessed with sounding as fashionably up-to-date as possible, Fanu strolls leisurely through jungle, drumfunk and breaks, caring little for timeliness or trends. Sounding a bit like a lost late '90s Ninja Tune artifact, Serendipity has a noir-ish palette of string instruments, worn-out melodies and speech samples littered throughout, a sepia coat that nicely accentuates its slight retro bent. But at its heart, Serendipity is all about the drums: even tracks that seem perfunctory, like the acid jazz hints of "Vailla Menneisyytta," suddenly boil over into blistering bouts of breaks. Serendipity is a restless and spontaneous collection, with left turns into breakstep and quick, darting weaves into jungle. Hatula manages to skirt the sometimes fatal rigidity of breaks music with his own homemade set of sounds, rhythms that sound so hastily assembled that they could go off the rails at any moment—and they often do. Take "Jupiter," which ambles along at 85 BPM before suddenly going silent and then erupting into full-on jungle, then settling into a friendly strut. The insistent weirdness is the same reason that the forays into dubstep ("Rise Up," "Paras Ystava") are not only punishing—Fanu's boundless energy compressed into a strict template—but unusually refreshing. While the drums are the focal point, Hatula's tracks are also blessed with melodies, like the searing electric guitar and rolling Reeses of "Strange Days" or the springy soul vocal that navigates the hissy drums of "Rise Up." At its darkest, Serendipity's not unfriendly or inhuman; much like Paradox's Ramifications album from earlier this year, it's a stellar and adventurous effort that shows there's life yet in genres that have been forgotten by fashion. Then again, you try fastening a genre tag onto Serendipity and see how long it sticks—because aside from its reliance on, well, breaks, it's not going to fit into any one box without a whole lot of kicking and screaming. It might have been, appropriately, serendipity how I encountered this record, but it's a happy accident. Even after over a month of close listening I'm still finding little rhythmic delights hidden in its many twists and turns.
  • Tracklist
      01. Jumitus 02. Vailla Menneisyytta 03. Rise Up 04. Genius of the Crowd 05. Paras Ystava 06. Jupiter 2011 (feat. Mineral) 07. I Can't Sleep 08. Nuku 09. Shatner Rap (feat. Greenleaf) 10. Trippy 11. Rave Like It's... 12. Strange Days 13. Pilvien Paalla
RA