- You know how with sports it's totally normal to feel ownership of achievements of people you've never met? Well if you're looking for a reason to feel proud of Oz electronic music right now check Logic1000.
Late 2018 self-titled debut EP on painfully cool Melbourne label SUMAC suddenly went mental when Fourtet tweeted about DJ Logic Please Forgive Me, a sneaky UK-garage work-out with a massive vocal from Canadian r'n'b artist Deborah Cox. Monsieur Tet called it 'one of the big tracks of 2019' and dropped it in his set at Coachella, and then suddenly acts like Caribou and Major Lazer were hitting her up for remixes.Bouncing around between tabla and percussion-driven minimalism, understated heavy club sounds and a beatless ambient number, it established a style that favours shorter durations, tight structure and a willingness to stretch over genre edges.
Flash forward to now and she's in Berlin, getting written up in NME, making mixes for Resident Advisor and generally crushing the scene with new EP You've Got the Whole Night to Go. Opening cut Like My Way is a shuffly bubbler to start up the night out, with warm shiny pads draped over a restrained bassline that breaks out of its single note rhythm to shimmy around pleasingly over the tune's tight four minutes as an elusive reversed vocal swirls and pulses around it.
I won't Forget keeps things warm with a reverb-softened shout vocal punctuating the drum-driven intro, a classic three-chord house progression sliding in as the filtered dubbed-out lead vocal bleeds in from the boundaries. It feels like something distilled from the deepest of classic vocal trance elements, but the execution is pitch-perfect for the contemporary dancefloor. Medium continues the nu-skool-throwback riff, a syncopated electro breakbeat drum pattern straight out of your 808-fetishist retro playbook, but subverted by gated analog synth chords drenched in reverb: another move out of the trance producer manual presented without irony and as if we should all feel a little silly for having stopped using it.
Closing cut Her takes the "lessons in old-skool rave" exercise to its, errm, logical conclusion, with a Plasticman-esque TB303 and drum-machine minimalist dub, portamento synth leads sliding up through cowbell and percussion heavy programming.. and like the rest of You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go it feels like an ambush, a surprise attack from a sound you’d forgotten, coming out of nowhere and disappearing too soon. I can only imagine the kind of crazy extended dancefloor edits that are going to come out of this EP.
Electronic music seems to constantly wrestle with its history: with its forward-looking aesthetic and obsession with futurity, it can be easy to forget that club music is pushing fifty years old, and that for all the novelty-seeking and forging ahead, there are rich veins of historical sounds that can be dug up and polished to a 21st-century sheen, if only the producer has the restraint, the taste, and the chops to pull it off and make it fresh. The current revival in UK garage from the '90s and noughties is only the most recent example (with Oz producers like Tuff Trax making the running, and SUMAC stable-mates like Cassius Select at the frosty forefront) Hell, even Logic1000’s initial EP tracks Precision and Na (featuring powerhouse DJ Plead) probably owe a little something to '80’s pioneer Muslimgauze. It’s inspiring to see Logic1000 getting this balance of history and future so right, right now.
Logic1000 excels at extracting the core memories of early club sounds and presenting them as self-evident, obviously current and up-to-date. So if you’re into club sounds past, present and future, Logic1000 is the player to get behind.
- Kieran Ruffles.