Juju & Jordash

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Juju & Jordash

 
Amsterdam’s Juju & Jordash share many of their fellow countrymen’s predilection for a sound rooted in classic Midwestern House and Techno, but even compared to the Netherlands’ many talented, decidedly wayward producers, Juju & Jordash’s brand of soul is particularly molten. For fans of warped, mutant House, their releases – on labels like Aesthetic Audio, their own Juju Music and London’s underrated Real Soon – generally deserve buy-on-sight status; they ought to appeal equally to fans of Lindström and Prins Thomas’ brand of Space Disco. “Deep Blue Meanies” reminds me a little of Modern Love’s take on minimalist machine Techno, with its blunt-nosed bass and mean, jabbing melody, but the track’s sense of otherness is a true J&J hallmark. Behind the streamlined groove lies a pool of queasy strings and bells that rises like some Xenakis phoenix to hijack the breakdown in an explosion of microtones. The flipside offers an even more thrilling display of dissonance. It’s a remix of their friend Lerosa’s “Ruski”, originally released on Real Soon in 2007, but where the original was a spry breakbeat house track in the vein of Herbert’s “Got to Be Movin'”, J&J’s “Ruski on the Roof Remix” goes all potato bug, curling into a ball to protect oozing bass innards behind a hard shell of bells and snares. Tri-tone strings hang in the air like the threat of lightning, while see-sawing bluegrass fiddles, freed from their usual harmonic context, sound as strange as any electronic gizmo.