ÆSK - ÆGC.v2

This tape came in right at the tail end of the year and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. Whether solo or collaborative, pressing play on an ÆSK tape brings you into a whole new world entirely, clearly absorbed with contemporary influences in the beat scene but existing somewhere between the past and the future. naiyō describes their music as having almost an incomparable wamrth to it, and it always stuns me just how organic it feels in all its sporadic percussion and wayward chops. Every beat almost sounds like the exact time it was pulled from (when that is exactly is hard to decipher), but as soon as the dim echoing synths and clicking hihats start hitting on prelude, you’re blasted off into the cracked burgundy skies of the cover. There’s so much nuance to the diversity of samples on this tape that bind together to build something indisputably cohesive, and everything isn’t quite what it seems. The slow skipping groove of ‘zhe.sdang.’ giving way to this weird reversed horn-like sample where you can’t quite make out what instrument it really is. This moves into a more steady head-bobbing pace with ‘ephemeron.’ that could’ve sounded like it came straight from a Kaytranada album, then back into the dizzying chaos again with ‘criterion.’ For someone who normally drops multiple projects a year, the 12 months between this and ‘hex.’ was well worth the wait; a kaleidoscopic display of difficult-to-decipher beats that feels just as much like a rubik’s cube as a warm blanket.

KEY BEAT: natus.iterum. - this feels like an amazing opening or closing credits to a movie, in its triumphant tropical synth progression battling against the slowly-building hihats and smacking snares.