- I was more than a little confused when Birmingham producer Raffertie returned from his long and unexpected hiatus with a podcast for Russian blog Gimme5. Benjamin Stefanski seemed to have completely jettisoned his previously established cartoon-rave style, flamboyant displays of hotheaded weirdness that tended to crash and burn in wondrously fiery wrecks. Instead, the Gimme5 mix was a smooth journey. Turns out that Raffertie spent his summer holed away in his studio trying to come up with something, er, different. On Rank Functions, the launch of his new SUPER label, he's emerged with a brand new style that's as effortlessly confident as it is frustratingly implacable.
Each track here hovers around 131-134 BPM, an agreeable tempo for both traditional dubstep and the funky-inflected house that's slowly taking over the UK bass scene. "Rank Functions" is a mess of synths gracefully ghosting and gliding through each bar in varying states of decay, navigating a minefield of distended dub techno chords and percussion; rhythmically, it's torn somewhere between house and 2-step and minimal, but where exactly I'm not sure. Fellow Planet Mu alumnus Ital Tek sets a spiky snake of a bassline underneath it on his remix, giving the amorphous groove some much needed definition.
Focusing more on odd sounds than a steady beat, the springy "His Counting Horse" is the most familiarly "Raffertie" tune, manipulating dramatic orchestral hits into stomping contours and needling basslines, while "Horse Flesh" schizophrenically pairs gorgeous 8-bit lullaby passages with abrasively grinding funky. Turns out Raffertie remains Raffertie, and his tracks are as imaginative and colourful as ever. They're just trapped in unprecedentedly linear patterns, a linearity that occasionally works against the music. As exciting as they can be, these tunes can also float by without ever really providing any real points to grasp onto. But when he finds a way to bust these grooves open, watch out.
Tracklist A1 Rank Functions
A2 His Counting House
B1 Horse Flesh
B2 Rank Functions (Ital Tek Remix)