Landform Erosion finds producer duo Fujako - Jonathan Uliel Saldanha (aka HHY) and Nicolas Esterle (aka Ripit) - returning to the seismic terrain of their 2009 debut Landform and subjecting it to a slow, deliberate collapse. Where the original album carved out a singular zone of “unlooped hip hop and telluric dub from the geological strata,” this companion piece treats those tracks as unstable rock faces to be cracked, dissolved and reassembled. What emerges is less a remix record than a process document: beats eroded down to skeletal pulses, basslines worn into subsonic rumbles, voices glimpsed like distant radio traffic across a blasted landscape.
The core materials are first dismantled by HHY and Ripit themselves, then further mutated by a cast of like‑minded conspirators. Spectre - long‑time explorer of low‑frequency dread and WordSound architect - drags the sound into even darker infrasonic zones, where rhythm feels more like tectonic drift than drum programming. Brussels‑based Tzii (half of Solar Skeletons with Ripit) widens the horizon with scorched drones and ritual electronics, while Milan’s A034 brings an electronic sorcery that teases out glitch, noise and broken‑beat shrapnel from the original stems. French industrial avant‑gardists Le Syndicat lean into metallic abrasion and fractured breakbeats, and Brussels engineer‑producer Rob(u)Rang (of Silk Saw) sculpts mixes where dub space and industrial density coexist in uneasy equilibrium.
Threaded through these transformations is a vocal cast that underlines Fujako’s deep affinities with hip hop’s more mutant fringes. Paris‑based polyglot freestyler Native, ex‑Fun‑Da‑Mental and 2nd Gen frontman Scalper, and the ever‑unclassifiable Sensational (a longtime Spectre collaborator with ties to Ghostigital) bring verses that feel less like conventional rap performances than like transmissions from the ruins: warped cadences, multilingual shards, phrases swallowed by reverb or strafed by distortion. Additional voices come from Paris MC Cheravif and Seraphim (a frequent Raz Mesinai associate), each threading their flow through the album’s shifting fault lines rather than riding over fixed loops. French lo‑fi turntablist DJ Urine, known for collaborations with The Locust, Otto von Schirach, Mike Patton and Q‑Bert, adds another layer of instability, his abused decks smearing and detonating fragments of sound inside already unstable structures.
Behind the scenes, Landform Erosion also functions as a compressed portrait of HHY and Ripit’s wider practices. Saldanha - a Porto‑based multi‑instrumentalist active in projects from United Scum Soundclash and Besta Bode to Sikhara, HHY & The Macumbas and various choral and installation works - brings an ear trained equally on tribal dub, electronic metal, Indian classical forms and large‑ensemble improvisation. Esterle, based in Brussels, folds in experience from Solar Skeletons, extensive live sound work and collaborations with figures like Marshall Allen, Mike Watt and Otto von Schirach, as well as his reputation as a mastering specialist. Their shared concern with space, resonance and bodily impact is sharpened here by the mastering work of Frédéric Alstadt and Esterle at Angstrom, who give the record a deep, three‑dimensional low end and a finely grained high‑frequency haze.
Visually, Erik Audoubert’s cover painting and Alexandra Sebbag’s layout extend the album’s erosive logic into the artwork, suggesting maps half‑erased by time or geological cross‑sections blurred by movement. As a whole, Landform Erosion feels like standing on ground that is still shifting: a re‑encounter with earlier work not as fixed catalogue, but as raw material to be weathered, destabilised and reimagined. It’s Fujako’s world, viewed after the storm - haunted, fractured, and humming with latent, subterranean groove.
