Recommended
Agnosia // Siete Catorce
Photo by Elizabeth Cacho.
The cover of Agnosia, the latest release from Hypermedium depicts a kind of Mescaline vision of Alien meets Predator meets Donnie Darko. Chemically altered visions aside, this most recent dispatch from the Greek label looks to the Latin American crossover for the hybrid trival productions of Mexicali producer Marco Polo Gutierrez, aka Siete Catorce.
Agnosia is at times richly organic, at others jarringly stripped back. ‘Canto’ delivers a heady mix of forest wildlife and fragmented speech atop primal percussive experiments and warm, inebriated pads. ‘Risa’ is pure dancefloor psychedelia, gentle drum machine rhythms clattering beneath sweltering synthesised atmospheres.
‘Susurro’ is a declaration of war in comparison. Dislocated skin drum rhythms and serrated arpeggios are ruptured by ‘Pulse X’ style low-end missiles. ‘Dialogo’ takes a similarly affront stance, albeit with weary intensity rather than outright confrontation. Churning low-end modulations thrust forward like an early Plastician or J Sweet dubplate - metallic percussion, glacial ambience and the occasional interruption of porch-door chatter lending a trip-like quality.
Hypermedium have displayed a knack for absorbing cutting edge club music on a global scale. The Rise of Gqom for example, by South African based collective Audioboyz ,delivered a headspinning, reductionist take on the Durban grown genre, while Agnosia navigates European club tropes and the trival scene perhaps more local to Gutierrez with ingenuity and precision. I look forward to the next surprise.
- Published
- May 26, 2018
- Credits
- Words by Theo Darton-Moore