kassem mosse: disclosure

Disclosure is a subtly intense offering of lush drum-machine nocturnes, gnarly electronica and glorious dives deep into zoned-out dub-space from Kassem Mosse. Evolutionary music, continuously engaged with experimentation both in the studio and the club. Whether prepared solo, or jointly with his spar Mix Mup, a Kassem Mosse recording is less of a stand-alone creation than the next thrilling new fragment clipped from an ever-mutating, unstoppable groove. The result is a back catalog containing some of the most mystical and essential dancefloor-rooted music of the last decade, from dusty, dream state techno on Workshop and Mikrodisko Recordings, to the frazzled percussive beat downs on Trilogy Tapes and Nonplus. Techno and house still animate Disclosure, yet with something newly microscopic about them. Its mesmerizing play of pointillistic percussion, melting-wax chords and fleshy bump'n'grind suggests biological processes at work, as if Mosse has zoomed right into the cellular metabolism ticking away at the music's core. These textures are channeled into some of KM's richest and most emotionally complex music yet, constantly pricked with terse allusions to jazz and dub: the deep blue synthetic brass and dizzying rhythmic fracas of "Phoenicia Wireless"; the swooning moonlit techno of "Collapsing Dual Core" and "Molecular Memories"; the frantic drum-machine tarantella of "Galaxy Series 7"; the heady, heavy-lidded drama of the closer "Purple Graphene". Sometimes, as on the glowering, sub-loaded stomper "Drift Model", his beats sound ancient, caked in soot and dust - an intricate ballet for fossilized drum machines. Disclosure brilliantly offers all the self-contained coherence and artistic authority of an album proper - yet it's always shadowed by the open-ended and questing spirit so vital to Mosse's music, the sense that anything could happen at any moment.