Hyperdub Rec

Burial: Burial [CD]

Hyperdub and Teklife Present Next Life [CD]

'It's been 5 years since South London based duo Kode9 & the Spaceape's debut album. On this new disc, named after Kode9's influential 2009 single 'Black Sun', the intensity and themes of their debut Memories of the Future remain, but the delivery is clearer and more rapid, the beats more jagged and restless. Starting as a dense onslaught, Black Sun proceeds to expand and contract its galaxy, sucking you into its orbit, and daring you to come and bathe in the warmth of its toxic glow.

DVA is a natural maverick, a one man spaceship, who on Pretty Ugly shows off an uncanny ability to create urban pop and dance that's full of rich musicality and unusual textures and ideas. Like all the most exciting pop and dance music producers through the generations he has a real flair for looking from the outside in and creating his own unique colour filled 3D sound, with a knack of tethering off-key ideas to good songwriting and pop formats. He's a producer that has come through grime and then uk funky but he's always pulled the blueprints out of shape, messing with different time signatures and syncopations, unusual speeds and strange synths, upsetting vocalists and creating music that doesn't easily slot into the format for raves. Hyperdub saw this maverick nature as a bless-ing, and so he's gone into the studio and done what he needs to make the music he wants.

Cooly G displays the full spectrum of her sound, plummeting from her sometimes melancholy, sometimes romantic songs through to her more menacing, trackier style. The album simultaneously recalls a legacy of black British music, filtering the female pressure and reggae lilt of lovers rock's kitchen sink dramas, the sweet seduction of '80s-flavoured "Quiet Storm" soul, through to sour, bitter-sweet synths, and the polyrhythmic dub decay of early jungle and tough tribal drums. The biggest surprise of the record is Cooly's cover of Coldplay's 'Trouble', making it shiver and bounce with a strange clock-work rhythm and epic techno strings. Concluding the album on the more colourful and heady 'Up In My Head', combining stop start rhythms with intoxicated vocals.

Burial: Untrue [CD]

After a string of 12s on Hyperdub over the last couple of years starting with the now classic 'Please' in 2008, Contact, Want, Love, Have is the debut album from Sara Abdel-Hamid a.k.a Ikonika.Contact, Want, Love, Have doesn't mess around or waste a note as she colors in and then discards the rulebook. Maybe it's her background as a drummer in a post hardcore band, her love of r'n'b and hip hop that bring in that extra that makes her music stand out from the legions. Or maybe its just her ear for a odd melody. While on the face of it the album seems to traverse a number of retro-futurist styles, including dubstep, uk funky and garage, 80s synth pop and computer game soundtracks, it re-mains totally contemporary, coherent and focused, making the idea of restraining her to a single genre irrelevant.