Dialogue Of The Speakers – Chillcode

Wow. In a word. I’d not heard of this being on the way, but just before their new album, Entheogenic have decided to hit us with something a bit special. On offer is what I guess you’d call an EP’s worth of new tunes, together with  remixes of both new and old offerings. New track Aranyanyara kicks it all off, and it’s immediately one of their most accomplished tunes yet. Effortlessly fluid, with incredibly sweet lines and smooth bass. Their sound has matured and been held back from the previous albums, sounding light years ahead of even Spontaneous Illumination. A key selling point on this, and a real reason to check it out, is the presence of Ott, who remixes two tunes here: Timeless ESP and Ground Luminosity. Timeless ESP sounds the more like one of his own tunes, with deep and breathy bass, and an addictive slomo-dancey groove that suggests that the lad ain’t lost it with regard to his upcoming album. Ground Luminosity on the other hand, is nothing short of a masterpiece. Retaining the wide-eyed glean of the original, it’s been evolved like nothing else by Ott: spacier than anything on Blumenkraft, it’s an utter stormer. I’m lost for words (for once). Vibrasphere pops up to rework Pagan Dream Machine, a wonderful and floaty journey through a vast array of gorgeous soft sounds. Very nice indeed, notable from the way that acoustic instruments slide in and out alongside electronic elements. More evidence, not that it were needed, that Vibrasphere’s downtempo output is more than strong enough for an entire album. Youth’s remix of Without Thought has an amazing, unfolding quality to it. Staggering, with pokes of reggae singing over the top of a seemingly sentient bassline, that just moves and ambles along in an eerily awake way. At times it sounds more like Smith & Mighty, which is a good thing – proper fat dub, to rattle the blacked-out windows of your BMW. The original (un-remixed) version of Timeless ESP is vintage fluid Entheogenic, with particularly nice acidy lines and curdling, squishy bass while Without Thought is sheer class… think a slowed-down squarepusher, with that sort of spontaneous free jazz vibe going on, while crystalline trance lines run up and down and around the outside. Really nice – this is likely to get caned at daytime sets in chillouts at the festivals this summer, and is as close to the mythical “psy-breaks” as anything else I’ve heard this year. Also worthy of insane amounts of play is Abakus’ remix of Aranyanyara, which is one of the bravest and most original remixes I think I’ve ever heard. He takes the original, and still keeps some of its groove and vibe, despite layering it over an incredibly sweet and well-produced 125BPM 4/4 summertime housey pattern that’s deliciously akin to Billie Jean. The breakdown is pure downtempo psy, and when it crunches back into the 4-4, it’s all about the way the two styles shouldn’t-work-but-do that makes it so damn appealing. Finally Shulman takes on Spaced, going very far-out with a sort of jean-michelle-jarre-meets-roni-size vibe going on – which is as delightful and as perplexing as that description suggests. All in all this is utter, utter class – I don’t recall such a varied and accomplished collection as this, and the combination of the diverse and eclectic remixes plus the decent new tunes make this one hell of a chillout album, the best released since Tripswitch’s Circuit Breaker.