About

With Hesaitix, the Berlin-based DJ and producer has built a strange world that lives and breathes. It’s a catchy, fascinating electronic album that lives in a lucid unreality. “For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects.

Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: Pan
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: Europe
Released: 2017
Genre: Electronic
Style: Experimental

File under: Leftfield
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