one of the great aspects of the endlessly varying bass music soundwave is the way it seems able, even compelled, to fuse antecedant styles and genres to itself. in the most innovative hands, influences from last month are absorbed and reworked as smoothly as those from last century, and creativity sparks brightest when the marriage of form and function takes place beyond recognised boundaries? and it?s from that unrestricted zone that uk producer o-dessa emerges. opening with an initial resemblance in sound to the same plaintive blue air of burial, as these tracks resonate deeper in the mind, it becomes clear that this sonic affinity is merely a veil beneath which a new heart beats. the rhythms lurking below the bassline in ?deeper? are like some undiscovered amalgam of old skool hardcore and something you might hear on the latest dirty south mixtape, which somehow manage to defy sense and co-exist in a driving and breathtaking way. mournful mariachi horns and a plunging dub bassline intermingle in a desolate approximation of sergio leone?s western soundtracks, while reedy flutes and distant female voices build a swirling vapour through which skittering woodblocks and metallic ticks raise an anxious sense of motion. anchored by a vast, cone-melting sub-bass undertow, ?deeper? s treasures are buried well below the surface. the juxtapositional subtle-tear-out nature of o-dessa?s production is even more apparent in ?million dollarz?, which reveals itself in stages to be a gradual descent into layers of tweaked amen breaks, but with a grandeur unlike anything previously heard, even though that drum pattern has already been chopped countless ways over the years. it?s not until midway through its five-and-a-half minutes that the famous phased snares rise from the dense banks of atmospherics, but when they do, a moment of blurred euphoria hits and the tune bursts into colourful life. this 12¬ is the first broadcast of many more to come from o-dessa, as - like many have in their own way before and still more strive to do so now - he embarks on his individual journey in the continual reinvention of bass music. instant thrill junkies won?t find their fix in these grooves, but followers of the path less travelled will recognise many signs pointing the way to a rich future.
