Moss, Jamal

'Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ taps into Jamal’s finest vein of tekkerz for a ribboning stream of chromatically colourful, insistently psychosexual club music for hearts, bodies and minds. By this point, readers of these pages should be very aware of Jamal’s prolific oeuvre; he’s been a GOAT to us for nearly decades now, probably listed here more than any other artist, and we’ll never tire of diving into his ceaseless stream of life-giving energies. This set of tracks for Modern Love are patently some of his most gripping, romantic, crazed and timeless; drenched in chaotic cosmic harmony and notably textured to the spirit-biting point, with thanks to Rashad Becker’s mastering which really holds up the facets of his raw cut gems to the light.

Slicing off just one cross-section of his ceaseless, holistic practice, the music here speaks to the endless variation within a theme that Jamal has made a virtue of since his nascent ‘90s productions. Where those early works with legendary mentors such as Steve Poindexter and Adonis still had Jamal’s experience of the original Chicago warehouse scene fresh in the memory, he’s come to singularly carry that flame far from the original object while never losing sight of its original reasons for being, seamlessly integrating lessons of Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and his DJ/diggers-instinct for classic synth and industrial musicks, into a syncretic roil of ideas that simply sounds like nobody else.

Plainly put, opener ‘The Lust With-IN’ is an instant classic, blooming with arpestral orchestrations and cinematic string pads for the end-of-the-night, oozing a similar melancholy fire to The Other People Place’s 'Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café’, while the psychosexual club oscillator ‘Erotic Abuse’ plays it slow to delirious & deadly effect. There’s a striking lick of tranced-out synths for the wall-slappers in ‘This Is 4 The Rave bangers II’, and frankly unhinged, speaker-worrying badness in ‘I Can’t Escape From U’ - a distorted grind of square bass x animalic synths that rattles like the hardest MMM peak-timer, while the bugged-out butterfly dance of ‘When Love Knows No Bounds’ deploys cascading drum machines and arpeggios on top of one another to fully disorienting, trippy effect.

Jamal is one of the true, visionary club mediums of our time, and we reckon 'Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ features some of his very best material - demented, soulful and restless - like nothing else.