patten: Aegis (555-5555, 2020)

November 30, 2020 at 9:00 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

patten: Aegis

I haven’t gotten around to checking out all the recent patten releases yet, but thankfully I did give Aegis a listen because it’s amazing. This is one of his more beat-driven efforts, and the tracks all refract a number of different club styles and meld them into something new. “Heat Loss” is a particularly sharp-edged grime track which is filled with abrupt double-takes and fragmented voices, while trance synths form a mist around it all. “Cloak” is sort of like an industrial-gqom robot march, gradually becoming more hallucinatory as the distortion grows and more dislocated voices are added to the mix. A thick, wavy bassline calmly levitates throughout the fractal chaos of “Gravity Bond”. “Drip” is faster and more of a battle scene, and eventually the frantic beats disappear, leaving a marsh of corrupted static. “Optics” has an almost straightforward club beat, but still feels tripped up by 8-bit glitches and modulations. Like a lot of tracks on this album, it comes back stronger during its second half, constantly pushing more sounds into the mix. “Goo”‘s bassline doesn’t change much throughout the track, which starts out light and somewhat chirpy at the beginning, but absolutely growls by the end, making the bass seem to carry so much lumber behind it. “Vertigo” brings back some of the captured voices that haunted earlier songs, and it has one of the album’s softer melodies, which seems to glow in a cool, dark shade of blue.

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The Answer Is In The Beat