A Tel Aviv-born and Los Angeles-bred electronic producer / DJ who’s recently relocated to Berlin, Mor Elian has spent the last three years steadily releasing 12”s on labels including Hypercolour, Delft and Fever AM. As you’d expect given her nomadic travels, the four new tracks collected together on her second 12” EP for Hypercolour ‘Persona Non Grata’ are geographically hard to pin down, with elements, of breakbeat, garage and grime fusing smoothly with techno’s relentlessly gliding pulse.
Opening title track ‘Persona Non Grata’ sees flickering twitchy electronics locking into place with spidery garage breakbeats and dewy soft focus synths, but what’s really apparent is the hypnotically lulling nature of the seemingly frictionless rhythms and monotonous, blurred-out bass tones. If the aforementioned track sees a ghostly echo of breakdance electro lurking just below the surface, ‘Xeric Zula’ sees tribal-sounding grimy rhythms and muted sub-bass drops colliding head-on with whirling melodic loops and squelchy analogue pulses, the background samples slowly building into a psychedelic whirl of noise amidst the sudden DJ spinbacks.
On the flipside, ‘Dysmorphia’ opts for finely-detailed tumbling techno elements, eerie space ambience and a tribal polyrhythmic undertow that once against feels more hypnotically lulling than anything else, even as the glittering electronic sequences and splashy hi-hats power off into the distance against a spectral wash of ambient pads.
Finally ‘Feral Chime’ brings things to a close what’s easily the hardest dancefloor offering here, as pounding 4/4 kickdrums provide a muscular undercarriage for eerie frequency modulated electronics and bleeping analogue sequences, the spooky pitch-bending in the background dragging the entire track off into darkness as throbbing bass tones writhe and lurch in the foreground. As with the rest of this impressive EP, even when things sound like they’re on the edge of chaos, there’s a curiously serene sense of calm at work here.
