Depth Affect – Arche-Lymb (Autres Directions In Music)

The second ‘physical’ release from the consistently excellent net label Autres Directions In Music comes from leftfield hip hop producers Depth Affect. Made up of 2 producers, a DJ and a video artist, their debut album is overflowing with ideas and influences – boom bap fights against stuttering chopped beats and glitches, cleverly chosen and manipulated psych rock and folk loops rise up against sampled rhymes, and electronic melodies bubble, pop and glisten. Although mining similar ideas of shredded and micro-edited electronic-influenced hip hop as the much more well known Prefuse 73 and more IDM oriented counterparts like Machine Drum on the Merck label there are strong similarities with the melodic structures of Four Tet circa Pause, and some of the production work of Anticon beat maker Jel. Despite these reference points, though, this is a unique and exciting work. Even if at times the beats are a little flat and lacking in bass punch, the density of ideas and sounds, combined with vocal contributions from Alias (Anticon) and Cyne (Beta Bodega/City Centre Offices), make Arche-Lymb well worth checking.