aerate - N1603 VI: ★Dub Of A Lifetime★
What better way to kick of the new year with one of the best tapes of 2025. I recently covered DJ Spinkles’ house masterpiece Midtown 120 Blues, which singularly argues against a sense of ‘house music’s’ universality, where its origins were rooted in “different beats and sounds” across various geographies and sub-cultures, rather than a never-ending global party. Many years after the release of this seminal work, aerate - one of the great minds of the modern day beat and tape music scene - argues for something different entirely. Through his eyes and ears, house music continues to be an unshakeable force, standing steadfast throughout his life to “break the barriers that keep us apart”. He should know - he’s cultivated a tight-knit community of underground art-seekers across many mediums, no less so than his discord server of over-400 people sharing and relishing in beautiful music from the furthest corners of the internet. Many of those ‘seeking soul’ shooting through links with hardly more than a white label in its thumbnail, it goes to show just how much house music and its adjacent genres means to this community. But no more than roy himself.
Everything we’ve loved on previous projects is dished out in spades: deep kicks and basslines, rattling hihats and huge snares fall atop the earth-moving sounds of spliced-up house, between transitions so smooth you don’t know where one track ends and the next begins. From the first moments of ‘It’s All Up,’ we’re invited to look to a thousand exploding constellations in the sky, metallic cymbals and swift hits of syncopated hand drums driving the deep groove. Across the project, we see the remnants of a supernova drifting through space, like the liquid synths and drifting vocals of ‘Get Hip To It’, or the stuttered almost-footwork-sounding vocal cuts and reverbed claps of ‘Groovin.’ I love that roy gives us a few brief moments of reprieve amongst the intensity of this church he’s crafted, with ‘Starfire’s drifting tape hiss and dreamy synth lines, or the absolutely gorgeous comedown of ‘Reunite’ as we return to reality, its crispy cymbals and rim clicks sounding as though they could’ve landed on any classic Portishead of DJ Shadow record.
It’s something he’s explored on many past projects but not with the precision and focus that he has here: this inextricable connection between our instrumental beat scene and house music. “It wasn’t structured in the same way a radio song was, and house music allowed people to dance” - the words that echo exactly what a great beat can be. “Without house music, where would music be today?” It’s a question we could ask the pioneering beatmakers that came before us. Beyond just a heartpumping experience whether I’m riding the train or running a treadmill, aerate’s music makes me think deeper about the sounds we’re hearing, what came before us and where we’re going from here. He’s a leader among a scene of innovators, and projects like this are only more proof for the pudding.