Blue Daisy & Unknown Shapes: Bedtime Stories EP (Black Acre)

Blue Daisy is an artist that’s been floating in my periphery for a while now, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to sink my teeth into any of his music. This collaborative EP with up-and-comer Unknown Shapes (of whom Blue Daisy serves as manager) is a dense, swirling collection of downtempo sounds. It seems so lazy to throw in a Burial comparison, but it’s relevant — the disembodied vocal samples and decaying dub treatments are not so far off the mark. But these tracks are slower and thicker… I’d liken getting through them like finding one’s way through a heavy fog. “Wet Dreams,” for example, is so laden with reverb and delay and effects that it barely has rhythm at all, just deep sub-bass booms and swirling sound, like Oval smoking chronic. Most of the time, though, there is a sense of slow, ebbing rhythm, with generous reverb on most of the snares so they sound more like explosions than drums. My personal favorite is probably “Insomniac Love” which sounds almost deliriously delayed, dripping with effects but not without a nice head-bobbing groove. It’s also one of the only tracks that doesn’t sport the Steve Winwood-styled lead synth sprawl — it actually works well despite that damning description, but I like that it’s absent on a couple cuts. Very nice stuff overall, highly recommended to anyone interested in the leftfield fringes of dub, chillwave or dubstep. This is none of those things really, but is likely to appeal to those so inclined…

Buy it: Bleep | Boomkat | iTunes | Amazon