Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 31st July 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
The title of Ran Slavin’s latest does, for all the world, sound like some slangy diss.
“I’m getting skibidi rizz.”
“Bruh’s hyper basic.”
“I can’t even.”
“Bruh.”
It’s been a while since I’ve penned any dialogue in a creative context, and it also transpires that it isn’t actually some slangy diss, but precisely what it is remains unclear, and the accompanying notes do little to solidify where we’re at here, focusing on informing us what the album isn’t, and what it doesn’t do, instead of shedding light on its actual objective:
‘Neither functional nor ambient, the album occupies a shifting territory where abstraction and physicality remain in constant negotiation – a deconstructed club language suspended between pressure, atmosphere, and perceptual displacement… Rather than offering release, Hyper Basic inhabits a state of suspension, where signals dissolve into beats, reduction folds into excess, and movement unfolds as much in the mind as on the floor.’
And so, from what I can discern, it doesn’t occupy any particular space, but hovers and ambulates in some ‘between’ space.
The ‘hyper’ seems to relate more to the schizoid energy which ripples through the album’s eight ridiculously hectic compositions. The first of these, bearing the title ‘Ritual Decay’ would, superficially’ suggest some snarling back metal grind, but what we get is some sparse electro groove, and ‘Static Ritual’ is infinitely more Gilles Peterson than John Peel, if you catch my drift. Still, while it may not be entirely my bag, I’d take Gilles Peterson over Jordan Peterson, or, for that matter, Gilles de Rais any day. And we shall move on.
It’s all pretty chilled, but for some reason, I personally find this kind of stuff impossibly tense. When the beats hit, it’s not that I fear bring grooved away, as much I wonder what will happen next.
This is very much a work steeped in the tropes of 90s and early 00s dance music – or, perhaps, more accurately, the sound of more underground club culture. Despite the insistent beats and vocal samples which drift in and out, Hyper Basic doesn’t even for one moment deploy the formula of the monotonous mainstream nightclub thud-thud-thud-thud. So that’s another thing it isn’t – a work of mainstream dance. Rather than glowstick territory, this is chin-stroking territory, dance music you don’t actually dance to, but reflect on, dissect, muse on the dynamics, the tones, the details of the beats, and the vibrations. The arrangements are sparse, and there’s space and separation between the beats and the low-key bass tracks.
There are moments when the introverted shuffles break out into all-out groove euphoria, as on the rushing bomp ‘n’ stop of ‘No’, which builds over the course of almost eleven minutes, but many of the tracks just flick and flutter along while whispers reverberate in the background. On ‘Beta Phase’ the beats turn harder, a thwocking metallic bin lid of a snare cuts through a woozy, rolling bass that’s dizzyingly dense and it’s anything but comfortable – although I suspect many would love it. A looped vocal snippet bobs to the surface here and there, too. ‘Found Luxury’ fires up a snarling, serrated bass which owes more to rock than dance, and it drives through a drifting wash of synths and samples amidst a rather conflict-filled semi-ambient concoction.
As with much of Ran Slavin’s work, Hyper Basic is hard to place, and just as hard to critique, largely because it doesn’t stay in one place long enough to get a handle on what’s happening. There are elements I just can’t get on board with, while accepting it’s a matter of taste, but it’s impossible to deny that Ran Slavin has a knack for bringing a unique slant to the dancier end of electronic music, and that Hyper Basic is anything but.
AA
Aural Aggravation 