British producer Matt Karmil has always approached house music from a different angle, constructing tracks that are functional on the dancefloor without necessarily ticking all of the boxes of standard club music. His music can often feel like staring into space while getting lost in a groove, to the point that you don't even notice what your eyes are seeing anymore. STS371 is his fifth album, and while it's just as unconventional as the ones that came before it, this one appears to be more focused. From the outset, ...
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British producer Matt Karmil has always approached house music from a different angle, constructing tracks that are functional on the dancefloor without necessarily ticking all of the boxes of standard club music. His music can often feel like staring into space while getting lost in a groove, to the point that you don't even notice what your eyes are seeing anymore. STS371 is his fifth album, and while it's just as unconventional as the ones that came before it, this one appears to be more focused. From the outset, something seems dislocated about the rhythms, but Karmil knows exactly what he's going for -- the heavy bass anchoring "Smoke" makes that clear enough. "Hard" is a truly sublime piece of dreamy house that simply sounds like a never-ending sequence of fluffy clouds rolling across the sky. Changing up the euphoric mood, "PB" starts out slow and sluggish before it's juxtaposed with a faster electro beat and acid gurning, simultaneously feeling like it's sitting in place and racing. "Still Not French" is bright and jumpy, yet understated, containing its high-on-life buzz rather than shouting it out to the world. The brief, fractured "Congo" is somewhere between a hip-hop beat tape cut and something from London's broken beat scene, while "SR/WB" is fast and propulsive but with a hint of post-dubstep syncopation and a peppering of both sweetness and sadness. The nearly ten-minute "Breezy" continually lifts the atmosphere up by digging deeper and deeper, widening the rift between thought and pure feeling. A vast improvement over Karmil's often erratic earlier albums, STS371 is more finely tuned without seeming contrived or calculated -- a dazzling flow of energy. ~ Paul Simpson, Rovi
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