Kailin - Fracture (2017)

This album is just so good, probably the most heavyweight, dread-filled Ambient LP you’ll hear this year, exploring post-club dimensions with eight tracks of hazy hooks, engulfing subs and grimy thizz rent in acres of space, something like Arca via Bladerunner. Beneath describes it perfectly as “uplifting whilst also being dread filled...”

Making up the first album release on Mistry after seven club-hingeing EPs from the likes of Batu, Laksa, Chevel and Webstarr, Kailin’s Fracture occupies an introspective middle-distance between perceptions of club and ambient modes of reception by disintegrating dancefloor structures into a near-metaphysical presence with mercurial, vapourising gestures. Like Schrödingers cat in a bassbin, it’s neither or, and possibly both at the same time, depending on your perception.

This paradoxical sense of detachment and immersion perhaps stems from the album’s production; originally sketched out in a 2 month haze, then left to steep for much longer, before the collection’s nuances and conflicting elements began to reveal themselves in remarkable formations such as the OOBE electro flex of Circling or the midnight quantum jazz dynamics of Gimp, or a really big highlight in the teetering, polymetric ambient pop of Respite.

No doubt it’s a fascinating and quintessential turn for Mistry, one which lives up to the label’s name and its roots in the duppie dread effect of UK soundsystem culture, yet never previously revealed by Beneath’s imprint in such absorbing and heady style before now.