fumu: almost, never, nearly where?

Diving deep into post-industrial scuzz and warehouse racket, FUMU racks up the deadliest, most skewed takes on dancehall rave noise and polluted ambient panoramas on his bristling new one for YOUTH, reflecting his roots in Teesside’s mix of Bladerunner-inspiring landscapes and natural lushness as much as his skooling in the rugged underbelly of Manny’s rave scene. If yr into owt from Gescom to Andy Stott to Mika Vainio - your time. FUMU is a member of the Return to Zero production/DJ crew with Turinn and Sockethead and follows his 2018’s ‘Sinuate’ debut with an aggy album of percussive wreckers and abrasive x beautiful industrial soundscapes compiled from his archives (a new album proper will follow soonish) and originally recorded around 2015-2018 at 'the tube’, the studio he shared with Turinn. It revolves around a classic interplay of light x dark themes crafted thru panel-beaten rhythms and sore electronics that are brusque and brutalist by design but not without an attentive pathos, where decaying, weathered textures and restless rhythmic variations coalesce in uncomfortable harmony. Cold, skull-scraping noise and voices from beyond introduce the LP on ‘Nu,’ before the brooding tribute ‘4 Mika’ lures us into the album’s instrumental narrative. Through jump-cuts, black-out fades and picnoleptic edits the album unfurls its secrets thru the bruised bumps of ‘Inna Tough’ and sci-fi electro scud of ‘Unlmtd Potential,’ twysting up mutant hardcore techno on ‘Its All Steel’ and belly-quaking power electronics on ‘Cloud Head,’ with ruthless yardcore noise in ’Skhs Pt 11’ giving way to a heart-swallowing closing sequence of ‘Bye’ via the gnawed new wave machine funk of ‘Recordingtapes’, and the shutdown masterstroke of curdled arps and plangent pads in ‘Extra 10.’