Cruise Sale

Cruise
Jon K and Elle Andrews finally mint their hugely promising new MAL imprint with an EP of proper dancefloor screwballs by Ausschuss; decimating UKG, dembow and industrial dancehall styles in a mutable volley of devilish club ballistics.

Berlin-based sound designer Linus Nicholson aka Ausschuss outlines the new label’s divergent co-ordinates with seven tracks that bend sound designer tekkers to structures that step in the cracks between styles, zig-zagging between crafty permutations of classic and up-to-the moment UK club music, and a world of influence from Angolan Kuduro to Latin dembow and Afro-Caribbean dub, or what is commonly known as hard drum.

Future-proofed by its taut but supple minimalism, ‘Cruise’ is an extension of Ausschuss’ previous rhythm and sound research found on 2018’s ‘Room 1’ mini-album with Milan’s Haunter Records. Ausschuss’ playful personality comes thru in its jostling drums and restless, meter-shifting nature, approaching each cut with a fine equilibrium of razor-sharp discipline and sense of mischief that sees him hop between styles and patterns with a joy-riding sense of fun.

Between the adroitly whirring 2-step syncopation of ‘Bunny Crutch’ and the drunken dembow swagger of ‘PSG 96’, he swangs the spare, enervated dubstep of its title track, which was produced post-rave in a corner of a Belgian warehouse, while the pealing horns of ‘Peak 5’ appears to summon the spirits of hardcore rave in a mutant sort of drill-tipped industrial dancehall, and the post-punk informed tresillo rhythms of ‘Beverly Services’ ricochets like a stray On-U Sound bullet that finds its target in 2021.

No mistake, it’s rudely countercultural business, colouring outside the lines of convention in a way that defies categorisation.