Rave Review: Synkro & Tom Jarmey - North Star
For the new release on the UK bass label Of Paradise, Synkro & Tom Jarmey connect for a drum’n’bass-laden beauty that shimmers like dew on tropical leaves. Yet despite the sun-soaked beats, the deeper into the misty forest these tracks go, the more apparent it becomes that unseen dangers are lurking in the shadows.
“North Star” starts things off innocently enough. It has the serene quality of the best ambient music out of the ‘90s — ethereal and euphoric. Before long, the harsh tonal grit of industrial-leaning dnb begins to scrape the surface. It’s like experiencing Dom & Roland or Technical Itch while relaxing on a beach vacation, with dark clouds rolling in and a highly charged static in the air.
“Midnight” creeps in from the shadows deeper within, the atmosphere dense and humid, with dub effects serving as audio hallucinations that keep the listener slightly disoriented. If “Midnight” is the fraught dream keeping you alert through the night, then “Shelter” is waking in a lost lagoon, where loungy downtempo beats pour — gurgling and glitching — from a nearby spring into the warm ambience of a sun-soaked pool. Here, you can bathe in the sunlight and feel each dub ripple against your skin, washing away the night terrors.
Pugilist takes the first round of remix duties, harnessing the lush beat forest of “Shelter” to build a prime-time dance number. Where the original mix was an awakening in paradise, the remix expands that universe with punchy bass stabs and ambient airstreams. The pace slowly builds into an airy club joint ready to take listeners on a mystical journey deep into the sweltering jungle.
The EP as a whole carries this mystical quality, harboring paradise on one hand and, on the other, a sense of unease at the unseen powers dwelling within.
The closer is an experimental rework of “North Star” by Silent Era. The soft ambience feels like a sendoff into dreams. The percussion is subliminal, and each synth swell disappears into a thin mist. In these dreams, paradise comes into view, as if aboard a ship setting sail toward an unknown destination, looking back only to see the sun setting over the tropics while the volcano at its center — previously unseen — begins to erupt from the low end: a rift in the void, and paradise lost.
(The Lunatic is an Austin, Texas–based raver spreading the good word through his reviews and blog—and by selling the wildest fucking electronic vinyl around.)
