Yugen Disciple - Ancestor Node (2022)

In advance of their first (and probably last) show at YOUTH's Cafe Oto showcase this week, Yugen Disciple returns with a rugged debut album of noctilucent greyscale hues and post-UKG mechanisms primed for heads into Shinichi Atobe, SND, Demdike Stare.

‘Ancestor Node’ dials up the bloozy late night sentiments to perfection across an hour of exclusive new material flush with a slowburn warmth and smudged but rudely insistent rhythms. Perhaps more than any release on the label since his debut, the dozen tracks here feel to echo a proper after-hours flex suspended somewhere between the balcony dancefloor and sofa gouch-out with a rare sensuousness that gets right under the skin and up the nose.

Flickering into action with the SND-like glitch shivers x subtle dembow on ‘Xerxes’, the set rolls tender bodies and minds on the offbeat between the wist of ‘Senecan Way’ and his MDMA-encrusted kiss-off ‘Unzen’. There are very canny cuts of AI electro in ‘Pleux’, and divine traces of 20 year old Pendle Coven or NMB works in ‘Pattern Recognition’, with strong turns to the darkside recalling Kareem and the Metal Gear Solid soundtrack on ‘Tactical Vest’. That darkness is balanced by absorbingly textured lushness of ‘Slow Parallax’ and the compression of ‘Volume Mesh’, plus a reminder of his discrete early beauty ‘First Sighting’ (from 2019’s ‘Sports’ comp) that help cement the nostalgic yen and timeless futurism of his sound.

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