- Between Boddika and a host of other recent UK producers—not to mention the Acid Test axis—have you had enough of the 303 yet? Yeah, well, LA's Zane Reynolds one-upped everyone else and went and put "acid" right in his artist name. But the young producer isn't just jacking Chicago jack. Though his recent turn on 100% Silk wasn't the most enlightening thing the label has released, #2, a hodgepodge collection of bits from tapes "left... in random places throughout the San Fernando Valley" released on Post Present Medium, shows a more adventurous artist experimenting—sometimes to his benefit and sometimes to his detriment.
Like a lot of the LA dance-not-dance axis, Reynolds' music gets by on an odd form of danceability, and the tracks here sputter and cough in patterns that occasionally form discernible beats, and other times seem to map out Rorschach patterns. #2 has the flow of something cobbled together from scrap material, with tracks bleeding into each other or abruptly rear-ending the next. It's like a collage of Reynolds' musical personality, every bit as bright and egregiously random as something you'd build from old magazines and other media.
So where does the 303 part come in? Reynolds manages to subvert both the pulsating sexuality of acid house and the near-funereal experiments of Recondite and Acid Test and instead puts the squelchy noise in a more hypnagogic, nostalgic context. A few years ago (when these recordings were made) this might have been called "chillwave." We get a mixture of beat-driven tracks that stick acid melody lines in sweet suspensions ("Acid Jam," "SFV Acid Styles"), and more brutal workouts like "Fremboli." Even better is the striking "Ballad" where an acid line teasingly licks at a drum machine going berserk in doubletime. SFV Acid is most intriguing when he places those licks in the cool-headed, muzak-y contexts of his best previous work. On "Summers Vage Cloud," drums struggle to tap out a rhythm over decaying drones as a paradoxically chipper acid line gleefully gurgles, and on "z!! b!!" he layers them until they sound iridescent and strange, a sense of off-kilter harmony not usually associated with the 303.
#2 is anything but a coherent listen, but it's not meant to be, in structure or execution. In fact, the album is most exciting at its most disjointed, like the way "Chaco Love Steve+Happy Acid Kinesinte" dissolves into bleary-eyed incidental music, or how "z!! bb!!" erodes into the archer machinery of "Speak and Read Rmx." His ideas are tangential and scattershot, but presented this way they become little eye-catching snatches of light, entertaining before they disappear as quickly as they came. Despite its title, #2 is by definition a throwback retrospective, but it makes his future look bright—or at least completely unpredictable, which in a lot of ways is pretty much the same thing.
Tracklist 01. Acid Jam
02. Granmasmitza
03. Gcids
04. Chaco Love Steve+Happy Acid Kinesinte
05. 8th Grade Trauma
06. Ballad
07. Sine CZ Contrution
08. Fremboli
09. z!! b!!
10. z!! b!! Pt. 2+Speak and Read Rmx
11. Summers Vage Cloud
12. SFV Acid Style
13. Slim Ministry