- With one of drum & bass's most enjoyable albums of the past few years under his belt in 2011's Under The Ice and a solid dubstep pedigree ("Xylophobia") to boot, Eindhoven's Jeroen Snik finds himself straddling several bass music worlds with a confident footing in each. He DJs on London radio institution Rinse as part of his home base Shogun Audio's show, and Rinse:19 marks the first time the series has reached out to a primarily drum & bass DJ to helm a mix. In typically unpredictable Rinse fashion, though, it's not really a drum & bass mix at all. By the end things are indeed careening in neck-snapping whiplash fashion, but through his impressive tempo synthesis and beat blending Icicle manages to span almost fifty BPMs over the course of this hour-and-change mix.
Snik starts things off at a 4/4-ish gallop with his own new tracks and Locked Groove's "Centraal," so that even at its slowest, the mix feels like it's rushing forward as fast as humanly possible. The brushed steel beats resemble a stepping take on techno, those hollowed-sounds Icicle favours so much meted out in tracky patterns. But it's not long before they begin to snag and skip in a rather familiar manner. The CD's midsection is primarily concerned with dubstep—from the DJ himself, and from names like Distance, Proxima and Youngsta. The way Snik so deftly layers these tracks loads the bars up with interlocking and cascading rhythms. We get a cycling, bouncy thing that sounds more garage than anything else, even as the LFOs are hissing and growling, buffeted by tense pockets of silence like Youngsta's "Untitled" which briefly threatens to stop the mix in its tracks with its start-stop lurch.
The temperature only rises from there, with the mix heading further into bullet-train territory with stunners from Rockwell (the tender but cutting "The Rain") and Spinline (the hectic "Alien") before the mix ends on a high note with his own "Full Moon," as if finally burning itself out from overexertion. As with the earlier dubstep transition, the move into drum & bass feels neither forced nor abrupt—in fact, it doesn't even really feel like a change in genre. There lies the most distinctive attribute of Icicle's own music, and it extends to his selection of others as well. While this sort of consistent gunmetal coat of armour can prove wearying sometimes—as it did on Youngsta's dubstep-focused Rinse CD—in Icicle's hands it's some of the most exciting and adventurous music happening in either the dubstep or drum & bass worlds.
Tracklist 01. Icicle - Intro
02. Icicle - Deep Tech
03. Locked Groove - Centraal
04. Icicle - Kick in the B
05. Distance - Searching
06. Spinline - Monday Luv
07. J. Robinson - The Maasai
08. Icicle - Together in the Dust
09. Proxima - Grunge
10. Icicle - Acid Step
11. Sleeper & District - Terraformed
12. Youngsta - Untitled
13. Proxima - Brainstem
14. Killawatt - Centipede Effect
15. Icicle - BNC
16. Clarity - Other Sights
17. Rockwell - The Rain
18. Spinline - Alien
19. Sabre - Halo Danger
20. Icicle - Full Moon