Audiopile Review: Seriously stunning debut album from the intercontinental duo Ys, who unleash a an incredible work of contemporary ambient-techno and post-club bliss that’ll have your head spinning if you’re into anything from Selected Ambient Works to Rephlex-era µ-Ziq or even Will Long’s extended ambient-house sessions. The duo flex a palette of breaks that range from intricate, high tempo IDM to stuttering breakbeats, filtering in a hazy backdrop of vocal samples, then submerging everything in a glorious bathing white light of gaseous ambient textures. Cannot recommend this enough!

Putting a pigeon amongst the cats we are back with that good shit. An out of step, incidental artefact of peaceful sophistry: YS – Brutal Flower (2 x “12 LP). A no airs and graces piece of cool future-proof ambience. A modern ballad for brave young clubbers, local pubbers, slipstream warriors, and emotional doggers.

The distinctive aesthetic hallmarks of YS are all here: slabs of urban flavour from emotional interior; raw data straight from the interface. ‘Untethered’ and ‘Down’ are chopped-up cuts of searching R’n’B – jaded jams of lustful erasure. On the flipside, blunted desire lingers in ‘Fading
Memory’. Both hopeful and mourning: this is the lay of the land in Brutal Flowers sharing that rare strain of underground synesthesia best located in dark undercurrents of early Mo Wax.

The orchestral ambience of ‘Autumn OST’ is a potent stupor of end credit cinematics. Coming up for air. It feels young in an ancient sort of way: pure as first snow. And from here in the album unfolds with the patience, tranquility and the expansive poise of a work that is for now and always. Pulsating gently to assured ending with ‘Be Together’ – a flickering skyline, swarming with warm memories. In between there’s flashes of heartbreak reminiscent of Beltran’s Ten Days of Blue and Blunt’s Stone Island (‘Look Up’ feels like a sort of spiritual successor to ‘Wake up’), that being said, when push comes to shove it only it ever flirts with its own reality.

An aesthetic reflection of a creative process that is delicate and restless. Created in the edges, where long distances, fast cities and global melancholia are wrought large. Burning the midnight oil Berlin-Singapore style: from real to reel. A sentimental exercise of modern faith by old
friends. With a nudge and a wink, Brutal Flowers is a (de)coded map of memories wavering with familiar intrigue. Patient listeners and the already initiated will be rewarded on re-visits – as playful & profound as you please, as deep as the heart.

The scathe that cuts is clean and deep. There are no sleight of hands to be found in this opus, only hearts are worn on the sleeve here.

A hill we’d gladly die on.