Blawan - Dismantled Into Juice [XL1330T]

Label: XL Recordings

The words inked across Blawan's knuckles—KICK DRUM—offer shorthand to the UK producer’s credo: a paean to the life force that is rhythm, the pulse at the heart of all things. The heart, of course, is also a muscle, and Blawan—real name Jamie Roberts—has spent the past 13 years sculpting percussion with a boxer’s obsessive focus. His drums (often, his tracks are nothing but drums) are big, bruising things, swollen with ill will and latent violence. Behind every beat lies the threat of a knockout blow.

But Blawan’s latest EP, the thrilling and bewildering Dismantled Into Juice, complicates things. It is one of the heaviest records of his catalog, yet those kick drums are practically nowhere to be found. Rather than the elegant symmetry of the four-on-the-floor, the record evokes a maelstrom of distributed violence. Rhythm as matrix, rhythm as mesh; a sticky web of mayhem bobbing in the breeze, snaring everything that comes close.