"Hashman Deejay’s debut full-length on Mood Hut as Musicentrydelete reminds me of this cocktail of magic and technology, of atmosphere, of chance, of luck and unluck. It’s an album where bands of light come in and out, phasers pushing and pulling through the air."
Sometimes I stop and think about how music gets etched onto a record, and how a record player can turn that etching into sound. I don’t really know how it works. Shortwave radio feels like a similar kind of magic. It’s old, and it’s mostly been replaced by things like internet streaming and satellite communication. But the way shortwave radio works is still a kind of miracle.
A signal ping-pongs up to the ionosphere, back down to Earth, and up again, many times. Without this back-and-forth ricocheting effect, it simply wouldn’t work. A good signal can propagate across many time zones, sometimes even around the world. Still, the signal is delicately dependent on Earth’s atmosphere and the time of day. If you’re lucky, the transmission is crystal clear. At other times, it’s a ghost of static.
Hashman Deejay’s debut full-length as Musicentrydelete on Mood Hut, reminds me of this cocktail of magic and technology, of atmosphere, of chance, of luck and unluck. It’s an album where bands of light come in and out, phasers pushing and pulling through the air. It feels both from the future and yet timeless. Though the beats are sparse, they lean toward techno in the most experimental sense. Each track feels like a transmission down from the ionosphere.
MusicEntryDelete is principled in its approach. Many of the tracks have a pandiatonic quality, where clusters of notes hover in a close cloud formation. It feels crystallised by light, as if each track were powered by a piezoelectric force echoing through the atmosphere.
It is an album that is practically bathing in light. The Solarpunk movement imagines the trees and plants and glass and buildings all working in harmony with each other. This album feels anthemic to this vision and to the relationships it imagines. Some tracks fade in and out, while others abruptly drop you in. There is a homegrown, analog quality to it, with bits of plate reverb and pitch-bending delay tails. It highlights the simple beauty of techno, of sonic study and experimentation.
On MusicEntryDelete, few melodies feel fixed in place, often meandering in an exploratory way…not unlike the loose, searching quality of Time Wharp’s Feel No Pain. The album opens with the tracks “1izm” and “K1Deep”, both refractive sculptures of light. The brief but effective “RiseMODX” follows. Each of these is a pandiatonic study drenched in delay – a preamble, even a loading screen, for the observer.
The album has a second act at the arrival of “Sub AM”, the first track with a beat, followed soon after by “MusicEntryDelete”, a true standout on the album. While not a fast tune, “MusicEntryDelete” has a gentle strobing effect, a kind of excitement that is informed by both uncertainty and optimism, making the album feel as if it’s accelerating, carrying with it a quiet intensity. The track planes up and down by half step, moving from one crystalline terrace to another, eventually shedding down to nothing but a dubby kick and some stochastically placed clicks and taps.
On the opening of “Wavebeats”, one gets that sense of vertigo you might feel when standing at the edge of a tall building. The notes are seemingly played by an impossibly large set of strings. I can’t help but think of Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, the Brian Eno-produced record featuring the at-the-time fresh-faced Laraaji. Here Hashman shares that same colourful, meditative approach to the notes. “Wavebeats” also highlights the spread of frequencies on this record, where the bass drum occupies the subsonic territories, and the synths shimmer at dizzying heights.
On “eBase”, Hashman channels a skill that he’s explored elsewhere in his work, that of long-form, slowly shifting, experimental techno. This track could stand on its own as an EP, and here it functions as an extended final act, one where all elements are at play.
‘Selfless’ is out now via Mood Hut. Buy vinyl from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
A1. 1izm
A2. K1Deep
A3. RiseMODX
B1. Sub AM
B2. Musicentrydelete
C1. Wavebeats
C2. Wavebeats (Dub)
C3. 1 electric
C4. Depth
D1. eBase