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Ruins

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$39.99

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Audiopile Review: Showstopping physical debut from Australian producer 990x, whose previous digital-only releases were heady sojourns into a syrupy interworld suspended between thunderous trap beats and glossy vaporwave textures. 990x slides neatly into the Sferic family, his billowing ambient hip-hop make a ton of sense next to albums by label alumni like Yungwebster, Space Afrika and TIBSLC, not to mention the textural ambient works of Jake Muir or Roméo Poirier. Reaching an advanced level of detail and refinement for this outing, Ruins is a beguiling synthesis of sub-heavy bass bombs and completely fugged ambient haze, 990x fitting the womb-like backings with sputtering drum machines and looping dream-sequence melodies. Tracing a line between the somatic spells of early Burial and the proto cloud-rap of Clams Casino, Ruins is a head rush-inducing affair that’s a sure shot for those already invested in nocturnal beats. Edition of 300, won’t last long.

***

990x has been blurring the line between rap and ambient for almost a decade, breaking up his subby, saturated 808 kicks and itchy percussive trills with effervescent pads, levitational loops and the kind of ghostly contrails you’d expect to hear on a Grouper record. He’s never sounded quite as liminal as he does on ‘Ruins’, though, an album produced in recovery as he contemplated the healing process, shifting between one state and the next.

As part of the recently formed label clique The Citadel, along with Sauron and IJI, he hones in on decentralised, defocussed sounds linked across continents by the internet’s rhizomatic networks, repping a certain slant on the sound that originated with Lil B and diffused via soundcloud to become a key node in the contemporary definition of what Brian Eno termed a “scenius”; a collective intelligence that transcends the sum of its parts. Throughout ‘Ruins’, 990x deploys all the hallmarks of the aesthetic – glyding 808 bass and sibilant trills, vaporous pads, and noctilucent melodies – with a melancholic grip all his own.

According to classic cloud rap convention, the 8-part, 40 minute suite evinces a liminal, weightless state of mind with immersive structures that appear to float, buoyed by subs that plunge all the way down, whilst his ambient soul wraps the head in high tog puff stuffed with hopes and dreams. Shimmering echoes of Lil B and Clams Casino’s early works perfuse ‘Forest of Silence’ in his use of guzheng-like string motifs diffused to the rafters on diaphanous subs, and Yungwebster’s screwed diagonals come to mind in the vertiginous bliss-out ‘Fallen’. A tempered ecstasy thieves thru the saturated cinematic panorama ‘June Lovers’ and gives way to the ruder ballast of ‘Crates’ while the fractal hi-hats on ‘Sonar’ ultimately get subsumed by saturated waves of bass and screwed ambient dub on the album’s longest cut, the subtly optimistic 8 minute parting shot ‘Wisdom’, deploying a horizontal dembow rhythm that can’t help but remind us of Kelman Duran’s epochal ‘1804 Kids’.

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