"Give U Space is a complete story that’s based on the many smaller chapters of material leading up to now, all of which have seen K Wata hone this signature sound"
Give you space. It’s the kind of thing you might say to a stressed-out friend, or a partner after a fight. A small, diplomatic appeal at the end of a tense moment. Given the name of K Wata’s first full-length album, you might approach Give U Space with that in mind.
In truth, it does carry this sensibility well. It consistently rides an uncompromising moodiness in which we experience these bits of emotional pressure. We feel it in an echoing voice saying “I’ve gotta go” (maybe a dalliance cut short). Everything about this record is dripping with brow-furrowing, brooding conflict. It’s like zone 2 cardio for your emotions, never beating you to the point of exhaustion, but slowly edging out the subtle details of your feelings.
In another way, though, K Wata has been giving us space for a long time. In his previous releases on his imprint SLINK, on anno, and, more recently on City-2 St. Giga, the space has been there. Give U Space is a complete story that’s based on the many smaller chapters of material leading up to now, all of which have seen K Wata hone this signature sound, a style that forgoes the appeal of peak-time energy in favour of the plot that’s happening between the percussion.
On K Wata’s Instagram, he talks about slink.nyc, an event series that examines a sound he and his cohort have had their eyes on. About slink.nyc, he says: “Brandon, Enayet, and I bonded over our love of slinky/slippery club tracks, and workshopped this party as a showcase for the DJs/producers pushing this sound forward.”
Particularly in K Wata’s productions, you can hear this sound. In the most arresting of his tracks, the BPM floats in the high 120s and upwards to the low 140s. Although a lot of the sonic palette takes inspiration from bass music, uk dubstep, and styles that tend to occupy the higher regions of this range, K Wata is not afraid to space things out.
In this way, his work, much like the final piece “As I’ve Always Said” on Give U Space, depicts a thriller scenario in slow motion. It’s an examination that is not afraid to completely abandon the notion of club-style dancing in favor of heady, high-contact, contemporary dance. Even in these weightless, floating states, the music carries a yearning, a longing that reminds you that K Wata’s approach is not clinical. It’s not merely dissection for the sake of experimentation, but rather dissection as a different kind of assessment of very human feelings. A look at ourselves, from a new angle.
As a result of these spatial examinations, his work on Head in the Sand and now Give U Space sees K Wata getting comfortable with long-form tracks. These pieces evoke a kind of elaborate stream of consciousness, even despite the high likelihood that their nuts and bolts have been placed just so.
On “There Will Be Love”, the most expansive of these pieces, we’re journeyed through an imagined world, formulating how, in theory, it might all work. This delicately-modeled, physically-possible-but-ultimately-hypothetical rendering is not unlike Barker’s latest and best work, though at a more subtle energy level. It’s this careful and considered construction in the production that makes the music feel life-like. It’s what immerses us in these scenes.
The beats alone on these tracks are fascinating. They rarely say the same things from one bar to the next, and they’re often composed of industrial-grade materials, like the foreground thuds on “Whisper Dub”. Often, there is a clear line of separation between the bassy, dubby elements and the kit in this kind of music, but K Wata uses a wide vocabulary to bridge the two zones, like on “Radio Embrace”, where the kit and the dubby elements meet each other and blur together.
The beats are often not the main character. It’s the air between the percussion. Here, we see K Wata push, pull, zoom in, back out, and work with the temperature. It’s where the music truly slips and slinks, like the snakes in Sharon Gong’s artwork. On tracks like “Go”, the space between the kit allows the echoey, reverberant ambience to take the foreground. Much like the depiction of an imagined architectural space in the artwork, we are made to investigate what happens within the walls.
There is, then, a double meaning in Give U Space. It explores the real-life drama we know all too well. It is some of the most deeply impassioned dub-centric music out there. But, it also explores the space and the environments these tracks live in. The attention to detail on everything else around the low end is what demands the most focus.
Give U Space is out now via Short Span. Buy it on vinyl at Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. Looking Glass
2. Give U Space
3. I Gotta
4. Whisper Dub
5. Radio Embrace
6. Go
7. There Will Be Love
8. As I’ve Always Said