Prettybwoy Tayutau

Hi-pressure club futurism from Japan’s Prettybwoy, deploying anxious, metallic, sweaty nu-dance pressure, cooled off by swirling videogame synths and emotional vocals from collaborator lIlI. Another rapid-fire dancefloor burner from Shanghai’s unreasonably reliable Svbkvlt, ‘Tayutau’ makes a bridge to Japan, curving Prettybwoy’s well-worn raw materials into a pneumatic neon club structure. He put these tracks together during a time of upheaval while dealing with isolation, job loss, burnt hard-drives and almost losing the whole project, the chaos reflected in the album’s writhing, anxious mood, dipping from mind-throbbing intensity to lithe, poppy delirium. Machine-gun bursts of overdriven kicks and burnt synths form the backbone of ‘Island’, ‘Brontides’ and ‘Mikoshi’, while ‘Genetic Dance II’ and ‘slt’ drag the weightless bounce into breathy, florid East-Asian landscapes. Prettybwoy’s confident engineering carries the tracks, and whether he’s exploring the limits of granular ambience (‘ó‹ (Tear)’), weightlessly melting piano and Japanese voices into bouncing subs (‘Isol’) or forming grime-flecked nu-club (‘Rat’s Talk’) there’s the sense that each sound is intricately and meticulously sculpted. The results fall somewhere between Foodman’s wiped-clean eccentric bangers and the damaged ‘n deranged club philosophy of contemporary prophets like Lee Gamble.