Kangding Ray

Enhanced and incredibly produced bass music from the Raster Noton camp courtesy of Kangding Ray, reinforced with stunning remixes from Alva Noto and Ben Frost. With 'Pruitt Igoe' Kangding Ray augments his sound to Raster's current avant-techno agenda, logging onto the 'floor with the burly swing of 'Rise' and 'Fall', both echoing Dubstep's move into slower tempos and elevated groove technology like some uncompromising Teutonic cousin to Pinch's 'Croydon House' sound or a steel-plated Shackleton rhythm trip. Of course this is all in line with Raster's overriding agenda of intense, considered minimalism, striving to eke the optimised impact from every sound and eschewing the need for any unnecessarily conventional melody or harmony. On the remixes, Alva Noto continues a streak of rhythmically charged form, following remixes for Greie Gut Fraktion and Vladislav Delay with a colossal remodel of 'Rise', filtering the original's distorted field recordings of street singers from Uttar Pradesh into something like an inverted version of Ancient Methods' stentorian techno funk. Finally, Ben Frost returns Kangding Ray's programming favour on his 'By The Throat' album with a gripping refix of 'Fall', placing kicks like boulders strewn on arctic tundra while dynamically contorting the ghoulish synths into nightmarish figures looming from the inky blackness. As you can probably tell, this is pushing our buttons, hard. So good. (Boomkat)