Djunya - Elevate / Puja Karna Sangit

Placed among the top strata of bass music practitioners in San Francisco, Djunya’s growing outernational repute, fuelled by previous outings on Mode, Narco.Hz and Eight FX, is primed to flare up with the release of his contribution to the ever-expanding collection of free radicals that is the LoDubs wax catalogue. ‘Elevate’ is a sprawling gem of a track, which manages to run with a certain ferocity without being derivitive, carrying its weight above a chassis of pronounced yet un-heavy-handed funky driving breakstep. By adding what is natural to such realms, principally thick layers of keys and rolling bass threads with a purely optimistic feel, ‘Elevate’ seems to conjure up a largely hidden aspect of the spectrum of dubstep, with a lightness of decorative touch and hazily sun-drenched atmosphere that places it in similar orbit to LD’s ambitious ‘Traumatic Times’, just around the corner on Hyperdub. With all elements of ‘Elevate’ so perfectly matched, finding an emulatory partner for the flipside would be an exercise in futility, so an alternative view of Djunya’s soundworld is offered by the beautiful piece of subterranean ambience known as ‘Puja Karna Sangit’. No less evocative in its own way, it expands and disperses like an indirect answer to the question of what Muslimgauze might be creating today in response the new movements in low end psychedelia, with Skull Disco-influenced percussive currents seeming somehow to pulse half-hidden beneath the waves of bass, like the detailed movements of single fish within the shoal’s vast rolling morphing mass.

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