- "A Bristol internal affair" describes legendary record shop Hardwax, where the first release on new imprint Livity Sound appeared—hand-stamped white label, of course—simultaneously along with Bristol shop Idle Hands. And it's a pretty accurate description. "Beneath Radar," taking up both sides of the release, is about as Bristol as you could get: two of the city's most intriguing and often heavy eye-lidded producers collaborating on a barebones framework, each taking the result home and having their way with it. The end product is the kind of house-informed, wounded rave music that has been defining the city's output as of late.
Though the sides are unlabelled, each producer's version is so essentially them that it's impossible to mistake otherwise. Peverelist's mix mines the same twitchy junglist hysteria of his work on Hessle Audio, a nearly constant stream of snares and hats dancing around a broken beat kick. Kowton's mix is minimal: sleepy and ominous, his unique feet-dragging percussion scratches out a hypnotically circular polyrhythm—Pev's beat pulled apart and scattered. The track's drop is like a reanimated corpse, tired and weighty yet surprisingly agile. "Beneath Radar," more than anything else, paints the picture of Kowton as Bristol's fastest-rising star over an ever-growing amount of peers. No one else in the city makes music as creepy (dig those decaying creaks that blanket his mix) or as universal as this.
TracklistA Beneath Radar (Kowton Mix)
B Beneath Radar (Peverelist Mix)