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Listening to the latest 12” from Tom Giles, you’d be forgiven that he went to sleep some time in 1983 and was roused from his slumbers, like some Arthurian knight, to save England from its obsession with faux-retro micro-genres. His studio, hidden out in the wilds of Hackney Wick, is certainly worthy of a disco Rip Van Winkle – it’s stacked to the rafters with enough vintage kit to make any decent producer want to go straight home and start listing their internal organs on eBay.
Giles’ previous twelve on Modern Soul saw him flex his muscles as a producer of sample-based wonky disco. This latest release, however, shows him stepping up to the challenge of crafting heavy boogie gems from scratch – with not a sample to be seen. The 12” kicks off with Colour Theory, a memorable mid-tempo number where crisp snares cracking between a lithe synth-line and a funk-bass backbone, featuring Alex Farrell of the London Afrobeat Collective on guitar. It’s a boogie daisy-cutter, packed, primed and ready for dropping on discerning dancefloors.
Photo Realism, on the flip, is an exercise in studied minimalism that brings to mind the deep boogie of Morgan Geist and his ilk. Fusing the hyper-melody of italo and boogie with an appreciation of sonic space that’s clearly borrowed from dub, it’s a late-night track definitely worth killing the lights for.
Yellow Orange meanwhile is a re-imagining of Patrice Rushen’s 1982 track "Remind Me”, albeit first filtered through the fabric of Tom Giles’ mindbox. If a hazy Sunday afternoon managed to sneak into a recording studio and became helplessly tangled in a Revox reel-to-reel, this is probably what it’d sound like. |
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