There’s not often a boring second in HAAi’s high-octane techno as a result of Teneil Throssell is a grasp of the short reduce. Typically she assaults her music with surgical precision, carving out breathtaking pockets of silence earlier than slamming the beat again. At others, she works with a area medic’s depth, slashing diagonally throughout mangled breakbeats, then suturing the wound with an overdriven blast of bass. However for all its frequent change-ups, HAAi’s music by no means suffers from a brief consideration span. Channeling the hypnotic, tunnel-vision results of basic Underworld, classic drum’n’bass, and the early-’00s output of labels like Border Group and Kompakt, it’s a sound as heady as it’s bodily. Throssell works like a movie editor, piecing collectively stray threads right into a kind that’s cinematic in scope; her cuts at all times contribute to an overarching sense of continuity.
Born in Australia and based mostly in London, HAAi has been growing her model of peak-time drama on singles and EPs over the previous 5 years, however her debut album is her most bold try but to spin the power of the rave into one thing greater, one thing that transcends the membership with out turning its again on it. Pocked with interruptions, entice doorways, and fractals, the maze-like form that it assumes over the course of its hour-long working time replicates the labyrinthine dimensions of an unfamiliar nightclub—its corridors and cul-de-sacs and darkrooms, its moments of exhilaration interlaced with descents into doubt or panic.
Throssell reduce her enamel making bangers, and Child, We’re Ascending hardly lacks for moments of depth. The very first observe is a kitchen blender overflowing with liquefied bits of industrial-strength techno. “Pigeon Barron,” which follows, evokes fellow Mute affiliate Daniel Avery’s dystopian euphoria in concussive drums and vertiginous synth glissandi. And “Purple Jelly Disc” is a white-knuckled rollercoaster that leads from a cavernous techno dungeon to a dawn seashore rave.
However the prevailing temper is ambivalent, the atmospheres continuously murky. The epic “Greatest Temper Ever” makes use of the voice of Scorching Chip’s Alexis Taylor to splendidly contrasting impact, distorted breakbeats tearing by pastel dream pop like shrapnel by a area of daisies. “I’ve Been Considering a Lot Recently” drapes pitched-down breaks in gloomy piano paying homage to the Treatment’s Seventeen Seconds, an enveloping fusion that remembers an all too short-lived pressure of depressive drum’n’bass that emerged towards the tip of the Nineteen Nineties. And “FM,” a spotlight, covers a sullen techno rhythm in Burialesque grit and fog; with a mixdown that tilts dangerously towards the bassy finish of the spectrum, it’s boomy but weirdly distant, like a heaving dancefloor heard by warehouse partitions.
