Even after the metamorphosis from dubstep to brostep, Hyperdub still stands for the quality of days long gone. With Cooly G’s debut, a long-awaited record has been released, filled to the brim with minimalism and scantiness. Due to those features, it has managed to illustrate what’s done wrong on so many tracks going out to the clubs of this world. Just take the beat of »What This World Needs Now«: it’s constructed and used with such skills that it keeps bouncing back and force in our brains. House, UK funky and dub were mixed in so delicately that »Sunshine« creates the most reliable image of a blazing summer’s day. The cover of Coldplay’s »Trouble« puts the listener into a similar mood and even adds yet another layer to the original – the justification to party to it. How could a variation like this one be dealt with better than to peel it all off to the core and then put it together again? On the other hand, »Come Into My Room« only lives on the tension between piano and beat, an area, in which many producers feel their fingers itch because they want to turn up the controller and get out the proper bass. But »Playin’ Me« does not follow those paths and that’s exactly what makes it so very special in this overloaded genre which tries to go higher, wider and faster all at once. We wouldn’t have expected any less of Hyperdub than this kind of deceleration and re-definition of electronic music. Minimalism has hardly been expressed in so many ways and ideas as Cooly G does it.
Playin’ Me
