Skee Masks: Resort Album Overview
Earlier than he was Skee Masks, Bryan Müller was SCNTST. Monday, the Munich producer’s debut EP, is simple and delirious, stuffed with tightly wound grooves and head-spinning change-ups; it rockets between electro, ghettotech, juke, and techno, every observe containing as many concepts because it does drum patterns. With that EP, Müller was trying much less towards science than alchemy—an method that proved indicative. As Skee Masks, Müller has spent the previous decade combining dance-music histories in all types of beguiling methods: dubbed-out hardgroove techno, fleet-footed drum ’n’ bass and bone-chilling atmosphere, psychedelic and minimalistic IDM. Resort, the digital producer’s newest LP, could also be his most potent distillation but. Right here, he makes his club-ready method to historiography clear, crumpling up timelines and sketching out a universe.
Whereas explicit particulars change from document to document, Müller’s tunes typically harbor an identical feeling: It’s heart-on-sleeve and hard directly, each drum touchdown with an icy precision and every keyboard stretching in the direction of the skies. Whilst he pans from one style to a different, that emotive method serves as his bedrock. His music sits on the intersections of breakbeats, ambient music, and techno; through the years, he’s grow to be so adept behind the boards that any seams are kind of invisible. His catalog is equally suited to basement raves, 4 a.m. highways, and sun-drenched afternoons—pitch the bass accordingly and also you’re good to go. Resort takes full benefit of this vary, enjoying like a guided tour of Müller’s catalog, every kick drum touchdown with the quiet intimacy of a well-known heartbeat.
A part of the fun of Resort is in watching Müller stretch out a bit, exploring new territories by revisiting outdated traditions. In doing so, he affords up a few of his warmest and most inviting music up to now, giving his always-precise drum programming a sepia-tinged hue. In its finest moments, the LP sounds beamed in from a barely completely different universe, one during which Warp and Rephlex by no means left the mid-’90s and each pattern arrived blanketed in a skinny layer of mud. “BB Care,” due to its ramshackle drums, dreamy synth pads, and barely there vocal samples, appears like a forgotten bonus observe from Music Has the Proper to Kids. “Hölzl Was a Dancer,” a house-music stomper with shuffle-and-skip drums and an acrobatic bassline, may need lit up dancefloors in 1992. The hazy synth exercise “Hedwig Transformation Group” recollects GAS at his most blissed-out, whereas “Waldmeister” shows Müller’s ambient-techno chops, with sun-dappled synthesizers gleaming amid groaning bass.