March: 7 bass & club releases you need to hear this month

Swan Meat 'Bounty' (PERMALNK)

Producer Swan Meat, aka Reba Fay, bursts onto the scene with her debut EP on Parisian experimental label PERMALNK. ‘Bounty’ is an exploration into the utmost limits of viscerality – your body is actively pulled inside the music and incorporated into the large-scale compositions themselves.

The record was in part inspired by video games and their relationships to bodies and selves, and you can feel that as you become entangled in the mesh of disparate sounds. The songs glow and heave with an overwhelming energy, held together by Fay’s spoken word pieces, choppy samples and massive low-end distortions. ‘Umwelt’ combines static blasts with choral singing and an ice-cold synth motif that rises slowly in pitch, wrapping itself around you at first comfortably, then tighter and tighter. ‘Phist’, featuring 111x, is perhaps the most clubby track if you listen solely to the drum patterns, but ambient landscapes and Fay’s voice cut through the haze for a moment of respite. This isn’t a record you can listen to casually; it demands your full attention and commitment, then subsumes you.

9/10