Spatial - Spatial

Emerging into a post-‘Untrue’ landscape at the tail end of 2008, low frequency producer Spatial made his remarkable debut on his own Infrasonics imprint with an EP journeying into rumbling, echoing, haunted dancehall minimalism. His immediately apparent attention to evocative detail in his music was equalled by a marked reluctance to self-promote;  “Here is my sound,” he seemed to say “and that’s all I need to tell you.” In some hands this anti-stance could have been massaged into an attention-diverting image in itself, but Spatial made then, and continues to do so now, a compelling case for the virtues of less versus more, naming his tracks with five-digit codes, dressing his EPs in starkly minimal sleeves, and releasing a series of increasingly clipped and swung exercises in spectrally-sleek dancefloor dynamics. One of the first artists to be described as “future garage” – a tag the man himself has been keen to shrug off ever since - Spatial’s technologically-enhanced re-imagining of the sound's 2-step origins assimilates garage’s stutter-stop shuffle, snappy woodblock hits and compressed emotion within a framework that also incorporates older rave elements like Detroit strings, Berlin-esque synths, muscular machine-funk, and microhouse clicks, in the process creating a highly distinctive sound world. Most of all, though, it's his expert manipulation of space to give a sense of buoyancy and loosened gravity that make stepping inside his music so inviting. This CD compiles all eight tracks from his quartet of 10-inches released between December 2008 and October 2010 – including ‘80207’ and ‘70810’ from the long-sold-out ‘Infra001’ EP – and adds five further tracks which were originally made available as free downloads in association with each physical release. None of these works have been available on CD before now, and hearing them unfold in series across an 80 minute sequence is as absorbing a trip into dark euphoria and flooding bass sensuality as you’re likely to come down from this year.

TRACKLIST:

1. 70707   2. 80723   3. 80207   4. 70810   5. 90121   6. 90113   7. 81012   8. 90729   9. 90807   10. 90731   11. 100319   12. 100402   13. 100505

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