STS371

British producer Matt Karmil has always approached house music from a different angle, constructing tracks that are functional on the dancefloor without necessarily ticking all of the boxes of standard club music. His music can often feel like staring into space while getting lost in a groove, to the point that you dont even notice what your eyes are seeing anymore. STS371 is his fifth album, and while its just as unconventional as the ones that came before it, this one appears to be more focused. From the outset, something seems dislocated about the rhythms, but Karmil knows exactly what hes going for -- the heavy bass anchoring Smoke makes that clear enough. Hard is a truly sublime piece of dreamy house that simply sounds like a never-ending sequence of fluffy clouds rolling across the sky. Changing up the euphoric mood, PB starts out slow and sluggish before its juxtaposed with a faster electro beat and acid gurning, simultaneously feeling like its sitting in place and racing. Still Not French is bright and jumpy, yet understated, containing its high-on-life buzz rather than shouting it out to the world. The brief, fractured Congo is somewhere between a hip-hop beat tape cut and something from Londons broken beat scene, while SR/WB is fast and propulsive but with a hint of post-dubstep syncopation and a peppering of both sweetness and sadness. The nearly ten-minute Breezy continually lifts the atmosphere up by digging deeper and deeper, widening the rift between thought and pure feeling. A vast improvement over Karmils often erratic earlier albums, STS371 is more finely tuned without seeming contrived or calculated -- a dazzling flow of energy. ~ Paul Simpson