BNJMN - 141

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  • Excuse the cliché, but you really can't categorize BNJMN's music; his album Plastic World, a recent highlight of Rush Hour's catalog, didn't share much in common with other releases on the label, which has tended to emphasize a certain classicist reverence for Detroit and Chicago. BNJMN's album addressed some of the same harmonic concerns, but its digital abrasions had more in common with artists like Lukid or Actress. The four original tracks on 141 will certainly not displace any pigeons from their holes. Rhythmically, he departs from the 4/4 cadences that predominated on his album: "One Sea" is a kind of slowly gliding 2-step, all syncopated bob and jab; "Inout" is a rolling fusion of drum & bass breaks and housey hi-hats at 140 BPM; "Hybridisation" pairs loping broken beats with relentless, 16th-note hi-hats. Only "We Are the Weather" follows a more or less traditional house/techno gait, with clipped hi-hats keeping the keel even throughout rolling waves of choppy vocal samples and overdriven arpeggios. But as much as the rhythmic signatures vary, BNJMN's handwriting is unmistakable throughout in the ragged, bitcrushed blend of samples and machines, a particularly scabrous take on sci-fi soul. Kelpe's remix of "We Are the Weather" preserves all the finest points of the original—the cratered chords, the distant vocals, the buzzing line noise—and swaps out the drums in favor of crumbling breakbeats, like Four Tet chopped and screwed. And Lukid, a natural choice of remixer, drops "One Sea" down to a shuffling 112 BPM, whipping up wispy voices and ringing chords over glowing drones, almost like a lo-fi Thomas Fehlmann.
  • Tracklist
      01. One Sea 02. We Are The Weather 03. Inout 04. Hybridisation 05. One Sea (Lukid Remix) 06. We Are The Weather (Kelpe Remix)
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