Lewis Cancut: Magic Circle | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Dance music has a tradition of … not over-thinking things. A producer gets their software, gets their hardware, bangs out the beats and sets it off in the club - you have your formula, now repeat. I’ve found, on several occasions, writing about club music is …unusual for the people you’re writing about. It’s so unusual that they can get a bit nervous if you devote a few hundred words to what they do; like it was more than they’d ever thought about it themselves. This is not a problem I’ll ever have with Lewis Cancut.

Lewis Gittus, mild-mannered academic by day, completing a Masters in Fine Art at RMIT, dons the mask of Lewis Cancut and brings snapping electro beats to the club by night. He plays to the extremes of both, theorising dance music style (you can read essays on his website) while producing music that bangs on the dancefloor and drips with synthetic, sugary pop sweetness. His knowledge of the musical history and awareness of contemporary style in dance is expansive and informs a startling diversity from cut to cut in his records, one which only grows across the course of his career.

I can’t say I’ve examined his output exhaustively, but in a brief tour of the catalogue I heard Cancut doing dancehall for a Portuguese label, Enchufada back in 2014, mixing up bouncing, funky house and PC Music on his first EP for NLV, Indoor Rainforest and adding Miami Bass and electro three years later on his follow-up, Air Condition. I’m not really doing it justice: there are other records and, even in the ones I’ve mentioned, plenty of other sounds than the genre fruit-salad already itemised.

His latest, once again on NLV, is Magic Circle. He’s styling it as a mixtape, throwing in a few more tracks than normal and, also, featuring fewer guest artists, which gives Cancut the space for a little more subtlety than his sudden stylistic swerves would normally allow. Don’t get me wrong, the pounding electro of Aircondition is still here in force, but it’s a more nuanced power than before. I think this quote from Cancut is a good one: “Having so much time during lockdown without the pressure of doing shows, I ended up listening to records for hours and hours each day,” he said. “Especially - heaps of electro, synth-pop, and boogie, all very synthetic styles of music that have heavily influenced me over the years. The way electronic music can be made almost from nothing like conjured out of thin air is a kind of magic, and these records each became like magic circles.” That’s certainly this record, right here and -prick your ears up, listen carefully- you’ll really hear the incremental shifts between those closely related genres and more besides.

Even on the sub-two-minutes of the record’s eponymous opening track, we take in what Cancut describes as ambient, but with a rhythm produced on a synth that sounds suspiciously like contemporary synthwave, although you could just as easily find echoes of it in late-’70s prog-rock. One of the things that makes Cancut intriguing is that uncertainty about what you’re really listening to at any given moment: wait, is this electro, electro house, early industrial? Dang, I don’t know! The one guest spot on Magic Circle is reserved for London MC Thai Chi Rosé, adding a relentlessly salacious vocal sample to Freak. IT’s a bassy slice of electro-house Cancut attributes to his obsession with ‘80’s club heroes like Egyptian Lover and The Unknown DJ, though, again, if you were to hear turn-of-the-millennium electroclash in there, well, who would I be to disagree?

The beauty of Magic Circle is, in the end, the same sorcery that Lewis Cancut has worked across his whole sojourn in dance music. There’s a deep awareness of history and the present too, one which will always make you think, even as your feet are operating independent of the whirring of the cogs in your mind. They move because this mixtape is no dusty, dry dance history, but a supple and sinuous, electro operator. Lewis Cancut is that rare kind of producer who’s good for both your mind and body.

- Chris Cobcroft.