https://mikeparadinas.bandcamp.com/album/grush
muziq has always been a producer with a distinctive musical style, the mark
of an artist. A minute of any song and you know it's him. He loves a good
manic ostinato playing with mournful synth pads, and he loves the classic
breakbeats. He can make the Clyde Stubblefield "Think" break sound like
square dance music for millepedes.
But compared to some of the many, many artists he's released on his label
Planet Mu, he's almost conservative. He loves his melodies, one reason
Lara Rixtin Paradinas singing with him (in Heterotic) is a
natural extension of what's already there in his music. He COULD be making
pop records, but he has stranger fish to fry.
In one respect he's still doing stuff that's very like his early Rephlex
releases. But those records, made in his early 20s, were made without the
mushrooming context of the UKs mad electronic music scene, something he was
instrumental in bringing about with his hugely influential record label.
The innocent goofiness and utopian optimism of the UK rave scene he grew up
with is tempered by maturity, but the playfulness and whimsy remains.
Of all the classic Warp/Rephlex artists, Paradinas is the least concerned
with sound design. His old records made the best possible use of Roland
D50 presets. Nothing in "Grush" will make you say "wow how did he make
that sound?" But it doesn't matter because he's mastered tricksy drum
programming and putting it in service of soaring melodies.
Someone might listen and think there's nothing new here, but if you do,
you're not hearing what he's doing. This is the last 35 years of
electronic distilled by a person who, a hundred years ago, would be writing
traditional dancehall ballads. Because the song's the thing.