turrin: 18 1/2 minute gaps

Outta the shadows and into the strobe-light, Alex Lewis, aka Turinn, debuts on Modern Love with a debut double-pack of sawn-off bruk-beats and anxious, nerve-riding grooves brewed in the ravines of North Manchester. Turinn emerges from a new generation of producers in the city that include longtime spar Willow, and upcoming producer Croww. Crooked and rugged, but tempered by an acute emotive sensitivity, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps renders a bleedin' cross-section of mongrel, hybrid style 'n pattern in a breathless, deceptively freehand fashion that comes riddled with an electric blue energy all of its own. Committing ten tracks of fractious, mutant funk and sore feels, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps serves to cap Turinn's formative phase of production like a lead lid on a nuclear rave implosion; trapping original 'ardcore 'nuum, Detroit booty and dank post-punk elements in a perpetual flux of in-the-pocket grooves which ravenously attempt to split at the seams, alternately pushing into Muslimgauze-like buffer zones of distortion or resoundingly wide ambient dimensions, and often both at once. This ambiguous dichotomy is epitomized between the rare surge of quick/slow torque in "Ovum", which almost sounds like Chris Carter sparring with Burial Hex, and then in his nod to the Italian new wave with "Elba", which seems to find the square root between Lorenzo Senni and some skudgy as heck Kassem Mosse grind, whereas the bittersweet soul of "1625" finds compatible links with his close peer, Workshop's Willow as well as Japan's Shinichi Atobe and scene enabler Move D, while "Parratactico" swaggers into quantum dancehall meters. The album title track runs at a next level Detroit momentum like DJ Stingray flipping Derrick May and Carl Craig's "Kao-tic Harmonies", before "ESO" cuts in like a super cranky El-B wearing itchy Primark underwear, and the bone-rattling hardcore jungle of "Spawn" soon enough gives way to the sweet lad couplet of "Petrichor" and "Ondine", where his elusive, distressed melodic touch really shines thru. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy; Pressed at Pallas.