Boxed mainstay Logos, one of the producers at the forefront of the instrumental grime fraternity, releases his latest EP Glass today, the second release for the “Weightless” Different Circles label he co-runs with fellow avant-grimeist Mumdance.
A Keysound allum, Logos — following on from his 2012 template record Kowloon — released probably the first definitive new-wave instrumental grime long-player in 2013. Entitled Cold Mission, the record fused ambient tropes, early noughties dubstep revivalism, and snatches of IDM with grime’s minimal angular beats and icy square waves into a singular statement that starkly set the producer apart from his peers.
Logos based his music and the Different Circles label identity on Wiley’s weightless Devil Mixes, featuring bereft, beatless eski versions of tunes that focused primarily on their low-end machinations. He and frequent collaborator Mumdance set out to prove — as Kode9 did on Sine of the Dub as well as many of the earliest, proto-dubstep tunes hinted at with their ultra-stripped back, bass-heavy aesthetics — that club music doesn’t have to be overtly percussive to have an impact on the dancefloor.
In an interview with The Wire, Kode9 observed that early dubstep’s barebones rhythms were “so empty it makes the listener nervous,” with the dancer having to physically “fill in the double time yourself […] to compensate.” The Different Circles camp has made it its mission to take this experimental idea to its logical progression, basically ensuing beats altogether, spaced apart so as to give the illusion of rhythm without ever succumbing to its full-on hip shaking allure.
Logos’s grime signifiers — save the ubiquitous badman vocal samples that peppered his earlier work (a sign perhaps that he is more confident with his unique spin on inner-city music than ever before and doesn’t feel the need to pander to genre convention so much) — are all present and correct, sitting alongside pastiche jungle fills, sound effects, and the interweaving sci-fi harmonies and ambient/white-noise/found sound tendencies that made his music stand out from the rest of the grime pack in the first place. That is, if you can still even call it grime…
Stream the entire EP in full below.
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There’s only a handful left at Boomkat, so grab while you can.
• Logos: https://soundcloud.com/logos262
• Different Circles: https://soundcloud.com/differentcircles