RSS Boys might just be the most colorful step forward taken by really intelligent dance music in a long time.
RSS Boys might just be the most colorful step forward taken by really intelligent dance music in a long time. Poles who claim to have met each other while traveling in Benin, they conceal their identities, don’t reveal their faces and are even stingy with the vowels (though all the more generous with the zeros). In fact, the only truly unambiguous track title in their catalog so far would have to be “RSVP,” a fifteen-minute elephant walk that also happens to be an absolute tour de force.
W Dont Blv n Hyp and Th T00th of th Ftr are their first albums, the latter released less than two months ago, and both are impossible to hear without a great big stupid grin cracking your face. Basketball-bouncing a loosely wound clockwork Africa, both muster a menagerie of rhythms and cartoony cadences. Peeping out of the brush and slithering through the grass are minimal melodies with maximal body that grow and grow as they draw nearer to the unsuspecting listener before pouncing with a bleat.
Together with their producer, known as The Complainer, they craft such a big, round sound, freighting the airspace around their cagey rhythms with energy and esprit, ricocheting it around a high, arched jungle canopy or unfurling it in the open desert air. Strange, dubby and optimistic, they keep thinking on their feet until they find out where they’re taking them.
An open-ended, still-growing remix project on Bandcamp features six (at the time of writing) wildly diverse remixes, whereof Antoniak/Navmort’s is the most surprising.
Both releases are available on Mik Musik. [Release page]
