The Amsterdam-based Audio Culture imprint follows up its excellent Presk and Cinnaman EP from late last year, once again in the form of a collaborative effort. This time around, Audio Culture has tapped two steadily rising UK producers, Hackman and Tessela, for a pair of heavy-handed rollers topped off with a remix from one of Amsterdam’s own rising talents, Presk.
Tessela’s stamp is immediately noticeable on Now I’ve Lost My Number 4. The title track opens the effort with machine-like percussion and an assemblage of bass rumbles in the deepest of registers, much like the sounds which have marked Tessela’s singles for the Bristol-based big-tune enthusiasts over at Punch Drunk. On “Now I’ve Lost My Number 4,” these heavier elements take up a majority of the sonic space, only fitting an accented 16th-note hat-and-shaker pattern and the occasional vocal snippet in between. In the same way, Tessela leaves his imprint on the flipside, “Feel Like Loving Me.” Again, the low end is monstrous, sliding in a brooding fashion between thick detunings and moments of sub wobble. However, the song also finds Hackman’s influence really beginning to take a more noticeable shape, inserting a bit of warmth into the otherwise machine-made cold of heavy UK club fare. Most likely thanks to Hackman, we’re treated to a few chords, along with well-placed snapshots of sultry male vocals and a playful barrage of hats and claps, rendering the tune slightly more memorable—but no less heavy—than its predecessor.
Rounding out the trio of tunes is Presk’s rework of “Feel Like Loving Me.” Slowing down the cut significantly, the rework is noticeably friendlier in the booming sub-frequency area, but still finds places to appropriately utilize the original’s beefy bassline. Leaning more towards the Detroit side of the spectrum than that of the UK, Presk concludes the EP with a bouncy slice of Amsterdam-style dance music, one that balances the weird and the fun with the dark and the serious in a manner that seems to naturally stem from his hometown. It’s a fitting conclusion to the promising sophomore effort from Audio Culture.
