jasss: weightless

Jasss makes her head and body-turning album debut with Weightless, an absorbingly stark and spiky set of industro-dub concerns, riddled with heavy inspiration from African rhythms, jazz and concrète electronics. After a trio of acclaimed 12"s for Berlin's Mannequin and Amir Alexander's Annunaki Cartel since 2016, iDEAL Recordings now give Jasss room to consolidate and expand her grizzled dancefloor structures to a full-length episode that brutally dovetails with Joachim Nordwall's unforgiving but compelling take on contemporary noise and industrial musics. Very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists, such as Diseño Corbusier, Xeerox/Krishna Goineau, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, Jasss firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite, and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing industrial music's angry guy glare in favor of far more feminine and Latinate pressure systems. She does so with an aching, puckered patience in the opener, "Every Single Fish In The Pond", escalating from a lone cymbal motif and location recordings to a pulsating darkroom boldness by the end of an incendiary scene-setter, before really getting her fangs in with the clenched but driving EBM torque of "Oral Couture", recalling a spiked Toresch or CTI hovering at the darkroom's entrance. From here on in a dream sequence of events take place, morphing from febrile, hash-induced triplet pirouettes in "Danza" through the martial free jazz/industrial cut-up of "Cotton For Lunch", to a definitive apex of sprung, stepping cyber-goth in "Weightless", with a pause for Alberich-like reflection on "Theo Goes Away", but the voodoo rises once again with the druggy swagger of "Instantaneous Transmission Of Information", and her stoic, blunt-edged mauler, "To Eat With Dirty Hands". It's rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as "Weightless", making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures. RIYL: Christoph De Babalon, Klinik, Toresch, Mecanica Popular, CTI. Artwork by Pan Daijing. Master and cut by Matt Colton. Comes in a gatefold jacket; Edition of 600.