Social Sport :: Economy of Movement EP (Steeplejack)

With Economy of Movement, Antipodean breakbeat pioneer Social Sport delivers five restless, shape-shifting cuts where fractured rhythms, heavyweight bass and psychedelic atmospheres turn the breakbeat tradition into something fiercely alive and forward-moving.

Five cuts of seriously diverse breakbeat chicanery

 

Antipodean breakbeat pioneer Social Sport knows what time it is. Economy of Movement arrives as five cuts of seriously diverse breakbeat chicanery, ranging across the territory occupied by beats that have escaped the tyranny of the 1 and 3. Because that, essentially, is the point: breakbeat breaks the line. Kicks bounce and lurch, snares and claps shuffle, hi-hats stammer and skitter, creating pace, tension and the possibility of movement in the spaces between expectation. Mr Sport understands these theatrics and deploys them with integrity and valor, honoring the traditions and foundations through which creator, creativity and the creative œuvre continually collide.

“Inflow” opens with serious intent. Kicks move through silver atmospheres of mountain mist and textural haze, summoning elemental forces and earthly gravitas. “Life” then takes the Amen break on a tangential excursion, all aplomb and swagger, building rolling thunder from didgeridoos and chopped vocal commands. There’s something here that, to my ears at least, accidentally invokes the gods of FSOL’s “Papua New Guinea.” Not pastiche. Not homage. Something more interesting: an apparently necessary Occidental parallel evolution.

Grit and grift rendered kinetic ::

“Movement Economy” introduces stop-start rhythms and female vocal fragments into a 2-step-adjacent landscape of spring-loaded didges and ticking-time-bomb mood swings. Dark? Perhaps. But I don’t really read darkness here as darkness. I read power. Necessity. Seriousness. Grit and grift rendered kinetic. Tight and sick as one. “Still Working On It” brings the archetypal breakbeat throwdown: reverbed 303, filtering synth tapestries and enough dancefloor adjacency to make the whole thing twitch. It’s a proper closer, exiting with a kablamo and the brand-new stallion hoofs of badassery.

Then LOIF gets involved, reworking the title track by diving beneath its surface and finding more room in the apparent darkness. The bottom end comes forward, the drums sharpen, and the bass assumes a more pronounced riff-like presence. Above it, silver clouds of smog and illumination hover while acid swirls stripe the walls with psychedelic color. It’s a redub, a reroute and a conversation with the original. More importantly, it completes the circle: five tracks that collectively reveal the specificity of an artist’s particular lens, and the possibilities that emerge when movement is allowed to escape its economy.

From the other side of the globe, I see you.​ Kudos. The work is superb.

Economy of Movement is available on Steeplejack. [Bandcamp]