Chicago footwork manufacturer Heavee first bought a style for dance tune via cartoons and video video games. In an interview, he cited the breakbeat-laden ratings from The Powerpuff Women and Jet Set Radio Long term as his creation to digital tune. A few of his first tracks he produced on a Ps 2, the usage of Funkmaster Flex’s Virtual Hitz Manufacturing facility. On his 2018 debut album with the Teklife collective, Heavee’s lush, nostalgic synth preparations set his taste except the extra minimalistic sound of his friends, and 2022’s Audio Attack EP, on Hyperdub, nodded much more obviously to the sounds of his early life, the usage of eerie melodies and 16-bit samples to emulate the ambience of boss battles.
Heavee’s first full-length for Hyperdub, Unharness, is in large part a find out about in sound design, exploring unusual steel textures, new-age kitsch, and antique membership chord progressions. “Free up!” opens with gnarly bass tones that sound just like the growls of a high-level beast in a role-playing recreation, accompanied handiest by way of droning pulses of static. It’s a profoundly unsettling intro (particularly for a observe slotted so early right into a dance report), however Heavee’s endurance can pay off when the weather in any case coalesce right into a beat. The outcome moves a stability between Hausu Mountain’s proggy sound collage and SOPHIE’s maximum purely percussive experiments; it’s a wasps’ nest of intersecting hums, harried fluttering, and insectoid chirps. “Whiplash” is a in a similar fashion business reconstruction of footwork: Round woozy, pitched-down instructions to “act a idiot with it,” Heavee hammers away as even though he have been erecting scaffolding within the backdrop. It appears like dancing because the membership continues to be being constructed round you.
In other places, Heavee offsets the ones pared-down cuts with baroque orchestration. Opener “StarSeeker” is as beautiful as footwork will get, with glowing synths harking back to ’90s IDM; “Smoke Smash” enlists multi-instrumentalist Takayuka Nakamura to play reside trumpet over dreamy jazz keyboards. A few tracks eschew drums totally, focusing as a substitute on Heavee’s fondness for the sounds of vintage synths. With extra conventional footwork cuts like “CanUFeelIt” and the Goodie Mob-referencing “WorkMe’’ filling within the area between the manufacturer’s extra out-there concepts, Unharness acts as a survey of each the style’s historical past and the artist’s personal.
