Distance
My Demons

  I still emit carbon dioxide and that's enough; maybe it's because the air passes from up there, where the square barriers that decide the path almost touch. I don't know if they really narrow or if my retina simply accommodates what Brunelleschi already intuited six hundred years ago; and anyway, it's nothing to worry about, at least until the encephalogram reveals something worse than a regular slow-wave sleep.

  The reverberations crossing my brain wait for my sole to rest on the asphalt; now I mark another step identical to others, just as the snare drum once again marks the methodical and not at all reassuring completion of a 4/4.

  Pause. Let's stop for a moment, there's no point in sinking into a metaphysical journey of subconscious metropolitan paranoia when I don't even know who the creator of the sounds coming out of my stereo speakers is. I mean, I know the name, DJ Distance, but a bit of contextualization wouldn't hurt the listening experience. The web proposes a journey that from Kingston ends, or is reborn, in the great London freezer of the '90s, where the d&b contaminated genres and in turn evolved, now in the direction of an obsessive minimalism, now encountering unpredictable coherences as in the case of jazznbass. The street, the underground, was and is a huge vinyl of new sounds; for a genre that gets lost in the mainstream (house, trance, hip hop), another one is born among clubs and pirate radio broadcasts (grime, dubstep). We are at the first lights of the 2000s, and dubstep arrives to keep them low. There are no dancefloor glitters.

  DJ Distance, as we were saying. (Re)play.

  The sound. Every sound. Sound as an entity, sound as such. Functionality, subordination to melody, to composition, takes a back seat. Because the sound space, the sound flow, are expressive in themselves, at least if treated as in "My Demons." Sound spaces chasing the aesthetics of electronics ("cold" reverberations cutting through themes, delays bouncing metrics, distortions making the original sample unrecognizable) but above all, gain from the masterful juxtaposition with "pure" emissions (the bass in the title track, the double bass drum of "Traffic", the percussion of "Fractured") that abstraction filled with charm and style that permeates the twelve tracks. Rhythmic regularity is a deception and a pretext to showcase finesse (the bass/beat interplay of "Weigh Down") and blend genres (a typically rock reading must be applied to the constant presence of a "riff," as evidenced in "Confined," with the distorted voice masquerading as an industrial guitar). To fuel it all, in a deliberately thinly veiled backdrop, that Leary-like air of "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out" that reminds us that the time to open the "doors of perception" has never passed, provided we accept the sterile mechanicity of what can be revealed to us among the square barriers that decide the path, while we are still emitting carbon dioxide. And that's enough.