- "Blacklist," by Seattle's Dave Pezzner, is a touch eager to prove its deep house bona fides. Tom-tom accents, skip-swinging hi-hat, lipstick-glossy keyboards, the works—only Pezzner also gives it plenty of rising, sizzling dub effects that add a steeliness to his refined contours. It's a good track, but the original version is the least interesting of the four on this EP.
"Blacklist" gets two remixes, by Hamburg's Stimming and Pezzner's fellow Seattleite Lusine, and they both hearken back a decade or so, when curvaceous house was first flirting hard with laptop tweakery. Stimming's mix is like a slightly drowsier variant on My Way-era Akufen, dabbing in snippets of tone tests and horns under a padding, unhurried thump and grinding bass. Lusine works in the same territory, but puts his emphases on a static, booming two-note sample loop, around which the alien twinkles and whooshing woman's phenomes of last year's A Certain Distance eventually coalesce.
Pezzner saves the best for last—and for himself. "Chiuso Per Ferie" chugs like a mother, looping a familiar vocal hiccup—from Off the Wall's "Get on the Floor," it sounds like—and lacing it through a beat that both hurtles and lays back. It jumps out so surely that when, at the 3:26 mark, he kills the beat for a solid minute, it's a chance to take it in. When it returns, joined by a clipped rhythm guitar, it sounds, if anything, even more self-assured.
Tracklist 01. Blacklist (Stimming Remix)
02. Blacklist (Lusine Remix)
03. Blacklist
04. Chiuso Per Ferie