- Cymatic seems a bit of a shadowy collective: we know who they are, but who does what remains a mystery. They make a smoky, laborious style of dubstep that alludes to a number of genre touchstones without ever actually touching on them. Often feeling detached from dubstep, it's enticingly foreign yet fits comfortably into more traditionalist perspectives of the fragmented genre—a conflicting dynamic that might be expected from a group that features Jack Sparrow collaborator Ruckspin and Quantum Soul in the dubstep corner, and duo Octane & DLR in the drum & bass corner
As it turns out, it's a fresh perspective. Both tunes are languid slow-burners, with "Electric Church" whittling its wick away in a manner that feels dramatically slower than 140 beats per minute. The track's backdrop is a gradually morphing cloud of guitar samples, lonely horns and midrange LFO basslines that ring out in solitude like they've wandered into the wrong track. The appropriately titled "Jungle Fever" centers around agile, spry breaks (still in dubstep time) that are curiously hollow, diverting the track's bassweight into each lithe hit. Again, pockets of LFO bubble and burst like fetid growths, no doubt the stubborn influence of the stabby basslines of techstep.
"They say we're gonna play loud because they play loud, and they got this real shrill sound... we plan for our sound to go inside the soul," says the Jimi Hendrix sample on "Electric Church," and that intangible metaphysical realm is somewhere near where these tracks end up. It's hard not to see the sample as a commentary on the heavy jump-up tropes currently gripping dubstep. Either way, that a collective composed of these particular names would make such reflective and experimental sounds is certainly a statement in itself.
Tracklist A Electric Church
B Jungle Fever