Chicago & Acid House Tape 3 Items

L/f/d/m, aka Richard Smith, makes his debut on Osàre, exploring the more delicate side of his intoxicatingly abrasive sound. Gold Like Glass is razor-sharp and elemental, with each track cast from long passages of synth dissected into heavy edits. According to Smith, this composition process is akin to printmaking, where the ink on a series of images deviates from the original stencil, becoming looser, softer and increasingly ghostly. ‘After Whitney’ is haunted by peak time rave energy; the drums are disembowelled, leaving a rolling climatic melody, utterly euphoric and disorientating. The track is followed by ‘Blood Byze Leech,’ a thunderously jagged affair, and ‘Delicate Push’ that fizzles like an electrified spinning-top, its frozen melodies accompanied by a lolloping beat. Turning over to the B-side, ‘Plute’ winds its way into dark psychedelia while ‘m-two nine’ descends into the realm of mutant de-accelerated bleep techno. Combing the ciphers of hardcore, its cruxes and suspense, with the serrated edge of minimal synth EBM, Gold Like Glass presents an
alchemical fusion of deeply danceable and cerebral noise.

The Chicago-based artist, real name Andres Ordonez, has been a fixture in US house music circles since the '90s, releasing a string of EPs on labels like Sistrum, Semantica and Sound Signature. Theo Parrish's outlet, which last year put out a live mix from Ordonez, will handle his first album.