Buy Link: beatport.com/release/nothing-here-but-you/3344872
Beacon Bloom (Ryan Ferris and James Allen) are a pair of genre-fluid mages from the depths of New Zealand. Following on from their debut with Melbourne’s Beat & Path imprint last year, the duo have returned with their most danceable work to date, a groove-centred club track framing Beacon Bloom’s trademark vocals.
Where ‘Droplet’ scaled the mountains of human experience, ‘Nothing Here But You’ heads to the jungles. The seven-minute expedition begins with the sound of teeming insects and tropical birds high in the canopy, while a lone wind instrument invokes unnameable forces from the undergrowth. Across the track’s seven minutes and twenty seconds, Beacon Bloom pack a huge number of elements into an apparently simple structure: swung, tribal drums playing off against a straight synth line; signature vocals that wave around like cellophane, and an epic arpeggio that wouldn’t be out of place on the first volume of Northern Exposure. The result is transcendent in an oddly specific way, conjuring (in the band’s words) ‘the breakdown of consensus reality’.
Rather than competing for grandeur, Uone and Jamie Stevens’ remix explores the original’s more sinister elements. Beacon Bloom’s vocals are transformed into a back-alley whisper, and only the shyest harmonic elements escape the remixers’ knife, twisting suspiciously and always just out of focus. Even the sampled birds sound afraid at the bleakness of their new environment. But the result of this ruthless approach is an outstanding groove that pulls you along into the darkness until you lose all track of time. This is the version for fans of Alex Smoke, dissociatives, and the glory days of minimalism.
Release date: April 16th, 2021.