Datassette :: Offal 2 (1996-2025) (Self Released)

Datassette charts not just stylistic fluency but lived evolution. These are not genre exercises but chapters of a sustained devotion to electronic form.

Not mere nostalgia, but continuity made vivid

 

Datassette very generously opens his creative narrative with the release of a staggering 100-track archive spanning Offal 2 (1996–2025) — a collection of tracks, versions and apparent outtakes that feels less like a compilation and more like autobiography rendered in circuitry. It’s an undertaking that resists casual review; to even attempt justice requires commitment, patience and immersion.

Across electro, breaks, IDM, techno, machine-funk and exploratory electronica, Datassette charts not just stylistic fluency but lived evolution. These are not genre exercises but chapters of a sustained devotion to electronic form. There is maturity here, certainly, but also tenacity — and the resilience required to remain creatively hungry over three decades in a culture that often discards its elders too quickly.

Track-wise, “Xenolith B” stands as a sub-funk IDM masterclass: clattering snaps parry crystalline abrasions, droplets of sound scattering across imagined metal surfaces. “Let’s Move to Belgium” toms insistently across the dance-floor, bass loops wiring themselves around the collective ankle before spinning the room into tightly paced tek-funk euphoria. “Insecurity Camera” channels the vertiginous climbs of European electro, all neon angles and forward thrust, while the ten-minute “Deep Sea Outpost” summons brittle oceans of ambience, expansive yet fragile.

There are moments of playful nostalgia and cinematic suggestion too. “Goodbye Mr Stevens” lands like a lost tech-house classic; one can almost hear Thomas Dolby lending a knowing vocal turn. 2023’s lilting “Tragic Mask” is a standout — beautifully reminiscent of John Beltran in its painterly touch — remote bass pulses carrying staccato arpeggios of melancholia. Divine, understated, assured.

Refinement rather than retreat ::

Elsewhere we find abandoned TV themes, sparse live ambience and fourth mixes of previously unheard gems — the artifacts and alternate realities that make up a working artist’s interior world. From the raw imagination of 1996’s “Crap Jungle” — a track that feels improbably conceived for its time — to 2018’s jittering “Polyhedron Navigator,” we map the terrain of a person dedicated to channeling the thing they love, for better and for worse, through richness and poverty of spirit alike.

The tracks from more recent years reveal refinement rather than retreat. Performed and programmed intricacies clearly deepen; an understanding of the use of simplicity sharpens. The sound of the technology utilized evolves, but clearly so too does deftness of touch. “Glass Rods” is a 2024 example. Succinct and complex in its simplicity, it’s signature changes and melodic arc are deliciously tantalizing.

For an artist to release such an archive is a vulnerable gift to set free for self and others — to let the work step into its own adulthood. And perhaps that is the quiet triumph of Offal 2: not mere nostalgia, but continuity made vivid. These wicked tracks do not merely document where Datassette has been but where we may be headed; they suggest an artist still interested in the searching, still dedicated to refining, still necessarily restless. The archive breathes it’s lungs to capacity. It moves forward even as it looks back; both,/and. Musical circuitry humming with an unfinished unblemished hope of endless possibility.

Offal 2 (1996-2025) is available on Bandcamp.