MDP5 is taken from a pair of EPs Skee Mask released this week that illustrate the two extremes of his music. The first, ISS005 is club-focussed – at times brutal – jungle and breakbeat, while the second ISS006 is entirely beatless, ambient atmospherics, and if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time at all it will be no surprise which of these I’ve gravitated towards.
Listening to any of these tracks in isolation doesn’t really do them justice: as with pretty much all of Skee Mask’s releases there’s a narrative thread that runs though ISS006 that really requires you to listen to it in its entirety to be properly appreciated. But MDP5 nicely illustrates what to expect, and is a marked shift in tone for an artist who, although often dealing in similarly deconstructed electronics, has never gone this stripped-back (or bleak) before.
The Predatory Wasp 