While there’s no shortage of minimalist dub house music nowadays it’s hard to resist it when done well. Overcast Sound are a Canadian who dabble in a kind of dubby minimal microhouse, reminiscent of prime movers on Scape and Meteosound circa 2001. That’s no bad thing. Popoloco offers four lean and cool tracks of roughly ten minutes a piece.
Overcast Sound’s novelty is to bring a muffled wash of vocals into the mix, like the distant singing of someone in the shower. In ‘Deer People’ this creeps in over springy drums reminiscent of Giegling productions, while ‘Loa’ is more restless and squirmy, owing as much to Villalobos as Basic Channel. Not so ‘The Right of Love and Death’, a live recording which uses all the post-Basic Channel cliches but comes off like a strong Quantec track, grey, punchy and flat, all fine traits in music of this sort.
Joshua Meggitt
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