Picks Of The Week (11.03.

1. Polyrom - Rumbling Bass / Techno Syndrome 💎 [Drum & Bass Arena]

Recommended if you like: Waeys, Particle, Trex

Every now and then, a completely new name comes along, with a sound that's so clean and precise that you can't help but immediately fall in love. Every single time I actually start researching these new names more deeply, however, I realise there's a reason for this insane quality: they have been around under a different name before! Some have a separate alias with a different subgenre sound running concurrently, some are also doing a lot of non-DnB stuff, and some simply wanted a brand new start after a lot of time in the scene. Polyrom seems to be falling into the latter category.

Russian producer Pavel Zhigarev, sometimes also called Paul Andrew, has been in the biz for quite some time now. While he began his musical journey playing guitar in rock bands, he and his brother also played around with a whole lot of Pop and Electronic music records during their formative years, mashing up their favourites from each side of the spectrum until they had accumulated enough of them to compile their very first "Geneticmix". So when Pavel then wanted to start releasing his own music, a couple years after first getting into DnB back in 2006 (!), he thought back fondly to these humble beginning and decided to call his artist alias Genetic Bros! With a mysterious masked stage presence, he was tearing up quite a few dancefloors soon after the launch of the project, but what really kicked things off was none other than Futurebound signing him to dancefloor behemoth Viper Recordings. During the early 2010s, he went from appearing on Viper's Summer Slammers compilation to releasing on Formation and Hospital Records, followed by a whole solo EP on Viper.

This lead to all kinds of successes, like multiple uploads to UKF and airplay on BBC 1xtra’s Crissy Criss show, but that still wasn't even all he did during these few years. Together with Steve KG, he had a little side project called Kinetics, whose music even landed on UKF's Bass Culture compilation, but an arguably even bigger thing was his label, Artist Recordings, later also known as Artist Music UK. Considering how common it is for new labels nowadays to at least start out with this kind of concept, Artist Recordings' approach of releasing all of their music for free was actually quite ahead of the times. In their sadly way too short time as a label, they managed to put out some of the earliest releases from then-newcomers Maduk, Grafix and Rameses B!

Starting in 2013/2014 and basically only ending in 2020, it started to become a little quieter around Pavel though. He was still working on music and media in general all this time, just in less public-facing ways. Not only was he the senior composer and sound producer for Pesni, the biggest Russian music talent show on air (and not a misspelling of something else, get your mind out of the gutter!), in 2018 he even founded his very own "Music & SFX Laboratory" called NOIZLAB! Chances are that you have actually seen his artwork and animation in action, with clients like NHL, Porsche, Audi, Tommy Hilfer, Samsung and HTC only scratching the surface of who he worked with since.

While this is obviously all working out amazingly for him, he never quite lost that urge to produce drum and bass, which is why he eventually returned to the scene in 2020 as Polyrom, with the extremely fonky, incredibly fresh banger Movement on RAM Records' annual compilation. For two and a half years since then, there was not much more to say about the project yet, but luckily, that changed today! After connecting and getting along well with UKF's Sampo and Drum & Bass Arena's A&R person in the backstage area at a show in London, he decided to send over some bangers of his and, as you can probably guess yourself, they signed two of them right away. Now finally released on said arena for the gladiators of the drums and the basses, which I don't think I even have to introduce here, Polyrom returns with Rumbling Bass / Techno Syndrome!

As you'd expect from such a straight-forward title, Rumbling Bass opens with a colourful assortment of (poly-)rumbling, well, basses, minimalistic drums and all sorts of atmospheric little sounds, all leading up to the iconic rumbling bass vocal sample. Once the voice announces what we're listening to, everything falls into place. The groovy bass is cranked up to such phat levels that I'm afraid my downstairs neighbours' silverware is going to fall off the table, the drums are pushed to maximum funkiness and will get every head to bopping status in no time, each of the heavily reverberated atmospheric sounds and synth stabs are expertly woven into the bass' ever-looping melody, creating a whole symphony of excellent deep and darkness. If you just look at each of the sounds making up the tune on their own, you'd see that while super cleanly produced, a lot of them mostly don't change much throughout the track, but, first of all, there's so many of them that you lose track of each individual piece, and, second of all, they are all arranged in such a tightly structured and musically satisfying way that they become more than the sum of its parts. Just a great tune all-around!

Our opener still had a tiny bit of that Movement-fonk to it, and followup Techno Syndrome's intro might have you believe there's some Disco vibes incoming, but soon enough, it makes it very clear that there's a new sheriff in town and his name is Filth, first name Absolute. With a da-da-da-dada-damn catchy chopped up vocal sample keeping us company, we are launched into the world of incredibly filthy deep and darkness, where the sub-heavy wobbly basses fly way under the radar, freely (poly-)roaming all over the place. While our vocal sample proves to be a worthy companion at first, it slowly but surely retreats back to safety, until eventually, the basses don't hold back one bit anymore and menacingly growl you into submission.

While a bit unexpected after his first Polyrom single, this new double-tracker of his is so well produced, so tightly executed, has such satisfying progressions and is just so damn all-around filthy that I don't even care that it's a different style. As far as I'm concerned, as long as the quality stays like this, Pavel can do whatever the hell he wants, I'm gonna be there to listen.

Other deep and dark stuff from this week:

Brain - Altered Zone EP [T3K] (100% of the proceeds are donated to charity!)
Arkale Dre - Take The Fall EP
Nami - 4 Minutes EP
Sudley - Rapidash EP
Revan - Night Beats / About Time

2. Binary - Lost [All172Things]

Recommended if you like: Notequal, Synergy, SLWDWN

It will never cease to amaze me just how deep the well of Dutch talent really goes. Even after almost three years of doing this, with me trying (and often failing, but that's beside the point!) my best to keep my artist selection as diverse as possible, it feels like there are still whole subsections of Dutch DnB artistry that I haven't covered yet. So let's try to chip away at it a bit again, by talking about dynamic duo Binary!

Based in Nijmegen, Anwet Verdonk and Kasper Ponjee were not necessarily involved in the usual big scenes of Amsterdam or Rotterdam you might be thinking of when imagining the Dutch scene. To still be able to quench their thirst for DJing, Anwer decided to create the SoundBwoyMurdahSystem collective, with which he, as Mission Control, Kasper, as Kappie, and a couple more like-minded mates turned all sorts of local and online places upside-down. While Kasper started out with the slower tempos of Dubstep before eventually transitioning over to the holy lands of DnB, Anwer seemed to have been a zealot of the Neuro fastness since the very beginning, even putting out a couple of solo tunes.

Around 2016/2017, Anwer and Kasper decided to expand their musical relationship even further, now adding DnB production to the list. Since Mission Control & Kappie is a bit of a clunky name for this project, they instead got inspired by the duality of their collaborative kinship and rebranded as Binary! Starting out in 2017 with a mostly straight-forward Neuro sound, they quickly found homes for their tunes on underground platforms like RustOut, ION Music and Raving Panda, but soon enough, they became regulars on Bytecode's Kill Tomorrow and you started hearing their sonics on Korsakov, Red Light Records, Axon Records and, of course, 0101 Music. Not to mention them becoming label managers at WTF! Throughout this wild journey through the labels, however, their sound tactically shifted from "normal" neuro to the more atypical newschool techy kind, becoming more and more precise and just straight-up piercing. In other words, their sound became something that a certain meme cat would feature on his SoundCloud.

Real ones know who I'm talking about of course, but let's tell the whole story: A couple of years ago, Northern-Spanish DnB superfan and occasional DJ Axel Hadzi, aka Koshmaar, began uploading clips of his favourite techy and forward-thinking dubs on his SoundCloud page, All172Things. It wasn't just a dump of random ID clips though, it was a carefully organised catalogue of upcoming music by some of the scene's most interesting artists around, no matter how underground they might be. Not only did he help build the hype for some of these artists, he also eventually started compiling released works of his favourite newschool artists into his New Wave Project playlists, laying the first building block for a community born out of his sheer endless passion. Over time, the account became more and more popular, and around 2021 he decided to use his platform for even more good.

First, he introduced the All172Things mix series, where the likes of Niallo, Moytra, Ewan Bristow, Karraki, In The Lab and many more would end up showcasing their latest dubs. Next, with the help of man like Gaijin Graphics, he gave the channel a whole new look in 2022, just in time for the unveiling of another project of his: premieres! That's right, since a bit more than a year the channel has been uploading a ton of upcoming tunes from all sorts of sick labels, with the total count having already crossed the 220+ mark (!!) at the time of writing. Even that wasn't quite enough for him though, and so he set out to add yet another pillar to his DnB empire: A label! Even though this particular part of the project has only been around since the beginning of the year, with releases by Sign, Nebulate and now also Binary, the label has already been featured on VISION Radio and at this rate might actually become a worthy Best Newcomer Label award contender!

So, what did the Dutch duo bring to Lost, their All10101100Things debut? Plenty of heat, of course! After showing off their masterful ability to create uniquely haunting atmospheres in the intro, which also doubles as a great tease for what's to come later, they fire off this insane barrage of fine-tuned rapid-fire synths, accentuated with heavy-hitting newschool snares and straight-up menacing bass responses. Throughout this first drop, we're already getting plenty of fun little variations, from a redistribution of the call and response frequencies to a little 4x4 expedition, and the second half is no different, with an extended, even more pounding 4x4 section, for all you fast techno lovers out there.

Binary have always been putting out one great tune after the other, but this new one might be favourite yet. They struck the perfect balance between clean and incredibly hard-hitting, beautiful and menacing, and a couple other very positive adjectives.

Other techy things from this week:

Zombie Cats - FADE OUT
Sorza - Ego Dissolution (Trinist Remix)
Notequal - Reversal | Upsurge
Holotrope - Falling
Niallo - Floating Away