Eye for an eye, the law of retaliation is carried out in all manners of history. Quite literally, in the natural world, butterflies flick their wings under attack, revealing eyespots as they continue to snap their wings open and shut. Flickering, insectile, and cocooning in its evolution, Mavericks follows the contours of retribution through enveloped drops and uprisings, creating vortexes as it decoratively motions through the air — circling gestures of sub-bass thrusting forward echoed by the return of trap snares snapping back with enough lift to stay aloft.
Perfectly timing its turns as it moves through wakes of its own passing swells, Mavericks continually recaptures the energy lost in its aftershocks. On numerous scales, the gravitational dynamics of Mavericks echoes planetary motions — histories of counterattacks, coup d’état or revolutionary-turned-terrorist groups, protesters contesting urban development or demanding presidents be overthrown — sparked in moments of outrage: the lineage of its tracks, beginning with the brunt force “Mavericks One,” torrents with successive repercussions; the descent of its phonic profile, convulsing from urgent snares, disseminates toward choral stabs, quick to react.
But Sami Baha produces such circumstances with a delicacy. With lightness of touch, the artist taps tracks out with ease. It’s indicative of Baha’s personal nature; the artist’s recent session for FACT showed an unassuming modesty in counter to an otherwise ostentatious stomping ground. Free from affectation, Mavericks is precisely executed with a fineness of texture not only representing the fragility of sound, but also symbolizing the vulnerability of revolution: from Taksim Gezi Park to Tahrir Square, its rhythms are open to assault.
Between the flight for knowledge, in total freedom, and a feet-on-the-ground humility, Mavericks is a magical creature of counterpoise, always hanging in the balance — a folklore of symmetry and tension, serenity and upset, composure and agitation, and invariably sincere.
More about: Sami Baha
