When Gabriel Szatan asked Teki Latex for his thoughts on so-called deconstructed club music, the French DJ said lot of it was "experimental for the sake of being experimental." He meant that some producers are stuck in a technical exercise, aiming to achieve increasingly weird or sophisticated sound design with no concern if it actually works, musically. The reality is, world-changing electronic music happens when you have both: the drive to push the medium forward coupled with a musical instinct that goes beyond novelty factor. The Los Angeles producer Amazondotcom nails that sweet spot on her first EP, Mirror River, the inaugural release for Subreal, her label with Siete Catorce. It's got the imploded rhythms and wilfully dissonant synths we tend to associate with deconstructed club music, but it also has the visceral power it needs to make a dance floor move in earnest.
Abundant sub-bass is key to unlocking that visceral body response, and Mirror River doesn't skimp on the ultra-low-end frequencies. All four tracks contain traces of golden-era dubstep in terms of how the bassline takes center stage—"A Flower, Nocturnal And Permanent" especially, with its LFO wubs and resounding negative space. It's decorated with a rich collage of highly processed samples (birds, trees, crowd noises), providing an element of cybernetic sound design you might not hear on a Deep Medi record. "A Drum To Ward Off Language" has a similar vibe, pairing classic UK bass with a modern textural flex, though there's urgency stemming from its nearly 150-BPM tempo. "Leopard's Dream" is full of sawtooth and square wave melodies which might be grating to some ears, or just sharp enough for others. The hand drum samples on "Priestess" are a nice counterpoint to the buzzing digital synths, which don't quite reach alarm-clock levels of intensity, though they get close.
