September: 7 bass releases you need to hear this month

Exit Sense 'Amor 107.5' (The Astral Plane)

Now ubiquitous in the digital age, edits of chart hits are like training wheels for fledgling club producers. It’s interesting, then, to have a concept record revolving around them. On ‘Amor 107.5’, Exit Sense imagines a radio station at the end of the FM dial that’s less tuned to a dead channel and more a portal into commercial radio afterlife. The Miami-based producer is obviously less concerned with the genre exercises that edits so often are. Instead he takes a cue from Elysia Crampton’s erstwhile project E+E, which specialised in classic mash-ups drawn from unlikely sources. Exit Sense achieves a similar effect using the same idea: instantly recognisable pop vocals and passages from modern composition or avant-garde sources, combined with (presumably) homemade beats. Partly, it works because of the quality of the instrumental sample choices, such as the fluid free-jazz saxophone cacophony paired with Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ or the atonal strings teamed with Young Thug’s ‘NASA’. Tricks such as the use of strings appear too often, though, and the novelty of the sound starts to wear thin eventually. But it still creates high expectations of what Exit Sense can accomplish without relying on the celebrity pull of edits.

7/10