Morphosis: cat. # MORPHA03
Released 2009

Track list:
1. Douglas Howarth - Would You Make Toast With Me (Intro Mix)
2. Felix Stone - Essentials
3. Oleg Zubkov - Thirst
4. Parallax Breakz - Serenity
5. Aeron Aether featuring Catherine - Twilight
6. Duane Barry - Stormcloud
7. Line Of Sight - Stardust
8. Stardesign - Between Nowhere
9. East Cafe - Flashback (Original Moment Mix)
10. Retroid & Bios - Ultraviolet (Original 2005 Mix)


IN BRIEF: Enchanting, but not evolved.

For a while there, progressive breaks really did look like the next genre to conquer dance music. When Sasha dropped Airdrawndagger, an album packed full of breakbeats, and then John Digweed followed suit by releasing Forge and setting up the Bedrock Breaks sublabel, the imminent revolution was scheduled. Progressive house's premier tastemakers had dabbled with breaks for years, but a bubbling undercurrent finally boiled over, and suddenly every man and his dog was making and spinning breaks. The likes of Fretwell and Shiloh were primed to become the new progressive heroes.

Six years on, Fretwell has made just one remix in the past year, while Shiloh pay the bills with electro house. Bedrock Breaks went into deep freeze in 2005 after just ten releases, and most of the progressive elite have gone back to their trusty house thump. Progressive ultimately seemed little more than a fad, its intricate production and glittering futurism at sudden odds with a club culture that was embracing minimalism and its Detroit history.

Many clubbers assume that a genre is dead as soon as their favourite DJ stops playing it, but prog breaks has survived, in the domain of small digital labels and DJs broadcasting out of Eastern Europe. Within this underground scene, Hungarian DJ and producer Retroid is undoubtedly a leader and his Morphosis label a veritable heavyweight. On Evolved Breaks he brings together a mixture of reliable names such as Aeron Aether and Duane Barry alongside debutants such as Douglas Howarth to demonstrate, to anyone willing to listen, that the sub-genre is still alive and well.

Because this is a digital-only release, you get the unmixed versions alongside an en bloc MP3 of Retroid's set, a format increasingly common as mixed compilations abscond from the corpereal realm and join the majority of new dance music online. This format is either very generous or irritatingly expensive, depending on your perspective. DJs and those who just like unmixed tracks will be getting the equivalent of two physical CDs for the price of one, or will be able to cherry-pick their favourites and avoid paying for tracks they don't want. Those who just want the mix set and have neither use nor interest in the full-lengths will curse when they see the mix as one MP3, exasperatingly labelled "Album only" on download sites.

Prog breaks as propogated by Morphosis, and fellow web-labels such as Tilth, Toes In The Sand and Navigation, is some of the most arrestingly well-produced music in human history. Music that was crawling along the very cutting edge of musical technology six years ago has not stood still in self-pity, but continues to pursue the very limits of audiophile-arousing sonic shininess. There is a danger here. Slide too far into self-indulgence and the melodic soul of the song will evaporate into the hyperreal ether of swirling layers, leaving behind a self-indulgent prettiness unfilling on headphones and almost useless on the dancefloor. Executed properly, however, and you have music that can inspire mountaintop meditation at home, and outer-body-experiences on the dancefloor.

Two factors keep Evolved Breaks mostly on the right side of that divide. The first is that most of these tracks burn with a strange yet powerful emotional hue: a blend of hope, melancholy and soft happiness that is as far away as imaginable from the stereotypical ecstacy euphoria or ketamine claustrophobia of so much dance music. The music pushes the digital boundary so far it somehow breaks through into some kind of unlikely organic pastorality, the sweeping chord progressions and beautiful synth timbres evoking grand images of panoramic nature as opposed to futuristic technology. Amidst the soaring pads and vast reverbed spaces on Aeron Aether's Twilight, the sole vocal track, vocalist Catherine's intimate vocals combine with flashes of acoustic guitar and piano notes in a manner that suggests that, deep down, this is an acoustic singer-songwriter piece that has been digitally projected onto the face of a galaxy.

The second factor is Retroid's set programming. Starting off with the small epic Would You Make Toast With Me, he devotes the opening stretches of the set to the most atmospheric, ethereal tracks and gradually builds up the energy, bringing in tracks with livelier basslines, and then switches between breaks and more energetic 4/4 house beats in the latter stages, finally bringing the set down to a gentle close with his own Ultraviolet. This build towards toothier material recreates a pre-midnight warm-up set, the ideal context for this style of music, and prevents it from descending into 70 minutes of directionless audiophile masturbation.

It's scarcely worth noting the mixing between the tracks: with the technology available to modern DJs and with all the time in the world to craft a mix compilation, there is no excuse for anything other than near-perfect mixing on a commercial release. Retroid mixes according to the progressive playbook: long, harmonically matched blends that invite you to try and find the join between tracks. It ensures you're getting the classic progressive listening experience: a seamless, flowing "journey" from start to finish, one that befits the style of music.

Perhaps that is the one real doubt about this compilation: nothing really deviates from the style manual. For all the incredible modern production, these pieces are essentially just shinier repeats of those breakthrough prog breaks tracks from six or seven years ago. In the temporal world of dance music this is often seen as a failure, but Evolved Breaks is not merely an exercise in technology, and it has the emotional and melodic content to remain creative and fulfilling even when it isn't innovative.

ACE TRACKS:
It's all quite nice.


Written by SYSTEM-J for TranceCritic.com. May not be reproduced or republished without the consent of TranceCritic.com. © All rights reserved.

Title: Retroid - Evolved Breaks
Category: Compilations/DJ Mixes
Sub Category: Break Beat
Reviewer: SYSTEM-J
Related Link: http://www.morphosisrecords.com/
Added: October 7th 2009
Viewed: 1896 Times
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