It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.
Watch video for "Investment Decision"
Hyper Nomads is on a label run by dance/dub veteran and ex-KLF producer Tony Thorpe. It is a sprawling album, its 20 tracks ranging from 30 seconds to almost seven minutes long, and it ranges from goofy to furious and spaced out to intensely focused, sometimes within a single track. Given that their sound has been honed over several years of live performance, with live brass and drums on many tracks, you might expect it to have a dramatic structure, but in fact it swerves around wildly in intensity, its peaks and troughs coming thick and fast.
So grinding, tense tracks like “Baby Don't Leave Me” and “Holding Ground” are interspersed with gleeful party-starting numbers like the rap-led “Raising the Bar” and the belting electro-soul “Sweet Tooth”, while a track like “Minneapolis” slips from clattering electronic claustrophobia into Hollywood chase-scene brass and back repeatedly. Elsewhere you'll hear grandiose reggae and a maniacal drum'n'bass cover of “Wipeout” that should send festivals apeshit wherever it's played. It's a confusing, confounding roller-coaster ride of a record – but thrilling nonetheless, and, as a portrait of the tumultuous state of today's electronic music, maybe pretty accurate.
