Review: Rough Fields + YTAC + Youryourholiholinessness - EISHAUS4

We begin with seven minutes of skydiver techno. I’m tumbling through the air. Cymbals and static suck at my ears like currents of air felt at high speed, as a melody floats by in wisps. My heartbeat is in my head. YTAC’s remix of Rough Fields’ “ZERO7411310518296” is a smothering, ecstatically airborne affair. I never want to come down. Yet as YTAC’s own “Freez” kicks into gear, I find myself with my feet on the ground again, dodging synthesisers that ricochet off the walls like little rubber pellets. Brittle handclaps and glacial high tones send the temperature plummeting in the second half. The melodies freeze to death. Between the freefall of the first piece and the title of this one, perhaps I should have been more prepared for this descent into the cold?

“Dented Yogi” by Youryourholiholinessness is the cave in which I seek refuge from the outside. Distortion laps at the walls like firelight, while slithers of icicles still drip along the entrance. Everything about the constituent parts tells me that this should be a brash and insistent track, but it’s not. Harmonies crackle in my ears and loop back round as though massaging my head in a blanket. I’m thrust back in YTAC’s territory again for the concluding “Fork Dream”, which chops synthesisers into jagged little shards and glottalstops of no-harmony. It’s crisp. Sterile. Everything falls at exact angles, forming a prism of crystalline corners and curt snippets of harmonic material. Music reduced to fact.