Verona may not only be the ideal place for tragic love stories after all. At least, making Montagues and Capulets share the same dancefloor in a sweaty, packed club is the kind of job Italian producer Omar Contri aka Shinoby isn’t afraid of. After releasing a couple of splits alongside Dance Mania’s legend Parris Mitchell, the man eventually comes out of the woods to christen his fresh new outlet Istheway with a solid first solo instalment.
No deceit, ‘Club Shock!‘ sports a title that suits its attributes just right. The title track itself manages to create an ambivalent sense of danceability, wrongfooting your mind with a subtle two-way groove that goes back and forth through what feels like pure sonic inertia. That’s where Shinoby appears to find his footing, right here in the gap between the start of the melody and the unhooking. That very personal way of recapturing the groove in the micro-breaks at the exact moment it declines before re-launching both the background melody and the bass lines with some sort of wonky yet superbly efficient balance gives Shinoby’s club tunes a very distinctive identity on the dancefloor.
On ‘There R No Rules Fear Is Unknown & Sleep Is Out Of Question’, Shinoby splits the apple in two with a ferocious clapping-machine on one hand and a soft and stifled piano melody on the other while the bumping kick slowly gets absorbed in an aqueous bath of overlapping cadencies. This contrapuntal sense of groove reaches its peak when the piano notes seem to interlace perfectly with U-Boats-like bloops coming from the depths. Delicious.
For his part, MGUN delivers a remix that pushes the double-trigger groove of ‘Club Shock’ a bit further with his usual taste for rebellious techno escapades. The breaks are filled by hard-hitting claps, offering an interesting contrast with the original while the bass line quietly drives the tune to stoned heights. Riveting. On their end, the Analogue Cops opt for the fully acid-drenched recipe and it feels a little broken-winded for the biggest part, the syncopated rhythm not really associating very well with the forward-pushing bass lines until the very end comes. Then the track seems to eventually find its second wind but it’s too late to really take you off like the previous did unfortunately. A rather frustrating closure to such a finely crafted and daring piece of softly twisted club material but still nothing that could make you forget that this Club Shock! EP is one fine and serious plate of subtle, mind-intrusive techno. Shinoby delivers.
Club Shock! EP is released on 17th October 2014, order a vinyl copy from Juno.