even when (if?) she was making dubstep in the past, subeena’s aesthetic was always a glassy, colour-rich and melodious one. whilst she indulges that kaleidoscopic take on sound yet further on this, her latest ep for opit, she also delves deeper in to the realms of house music (at least in terms of beat patterns). what’s great about this music is the way it sounds so real, as if played by humans, not programmed by robots or processed as 1 and 0s. there’s a breadth and depth to the productions, too, which hark of ability.
‘wrong for me’ opens things up with harmonic four-tet styled melodies before a lazy, broken beat loop looms deep and a granular vocal cuts through the otherwise detached, psychedelic sounds. the midpoint marks a tempo shift as synths begin to sing out intense, long held notes; a churning sub swells and swells and beats tumble into a canter: it makes for an elastic arrangement of sounds that all rise and fall together across an elongated horizontal plane, but only briefly, for the clam swiftly returns and the slow, underlying swell of the whole hypnagogic track comes back to the fore.
the long, darkly trance-y house of delsin types redshape or morphosis come to mind throughout best cut ‘space of flow’ for the way it pairs tinkling, hung melodies with snappy snares, elongated lines and fizzing, spiralling background fx. the whole dark march seems suspended in mid air with alien beams shooting through at random points and, again, an ocean-like swell subtly shifts the whole thing forward. it’s tense stuff, too, with a kick anxiously kicking the same pattern, without resolve, unlike the less tethered beats, taught synths and barely-shackled, early detroit electro vibes of ‘end of reason’. overall, classy shit.