*PRE-ORDER* FUNKSHN 'CONTACT' CASETTE

funkshn's third album is a mark in the sand, a chance for the UK-based Russian producer to take stock of his experience and devise a set of impishly innovative experimental club music that leaves no stone unturned. Before 'CONTACT', Aleksei Surkov had already displayed his voracious appetite for global bass sounds, drawing on D&B, jungle, dubstep and IDM on 2021's 'Калькулэйтид Тантрум'. And just a few months later he went back to the drawing board with 'Флюгер', an album that confronted the grim reality of death, fusing footwork with EDM, deconstructed club and hypnotic dub techno. Since then, Surkov has looked inward, releasing occasional short-form transmissions like the dark and dystopian 'megadrift / ecerats' and continuously sharpening his skills, hoarding his most potent productions for a more definitive statement.

'CONTACT' is the record Surkov has been building up to all along, led by the electrifying 'sato', a fusion of glitchy Ed Banger-style "French touch" house, fractal jungle and noisy, cybernetic interference that sounds like a transmission from the far future. And it never stays in a single place for too long. The title track rips out footwork's endoskeleton and electroplates it with smeared digital effects, distorted hardstyle kicks and disorienting foley sounds, muddling the genre's signature stuttering vocals with vortex-like bursts of white noise. 'VULTURE' meanwhile picks at the scraps left by EDM, smashing the unmistakable sawtooth synths with woody, syncopated drums and haunting the wreckage with the ghosts of speed garage. And 'PAT' imagines a fusion of East Coast club and nihilistic dungeon techno, a flurry of swinging kicks and acidic squeals that's interrupted by disorienting aural hallucinations.

Taken in isolation, each track appears to visualize different landmarks on bass music's wide, open terrain. Heard as a whole though, 'CONTACT' plots a course through hazardous new territory, channeling the memories of terrestrial sounds into a suite of hybridized, pneumatic club experiments that endlessly search for the dancefloor's El Dorado.