At the top of the 2010s, when Machinedrum’s Travis Stewart and Jimmy Edgar were releasing projects on the UK label Hotflush, they started a collaborative duo under the moniker J-E-T-S. It was the latest addition to a long list of individual and collaborative pseudonyms: Edgar previously contributed to X District, Her Bad Habit, and Plus Device, while Stewart has issued material as Syndrone, Tstewart, and Sepalcure. J-E-T-S released an EP in 2012 and another in 2015, each offering a handful of soul-inflected DayGlo house and techno tracks. Now, almost seven years after their inception, they’ve returned with their debut full-length Zoospa, a futuristic patchwork of bass, hip-hop, and R&B.
Zoospa plays as if Stewart and Edgar tossed their favorite bits of American pop in a blender, printed them on a floppy disk, used it for a game of hopscotch, and then scanned it back into Ableton. In a recent interview, the duo highlighted the influence of ’90s gospel and noted their use of a chord voicing called quartal harmony, a technique popular in synthesizer music of the early ’70s. They were also adamant that Zoospa should not sound too “throwback,” creating a new sound pack through Edgar’s “super complex modular system” in a bid to avoid unwelcome familiarity.
As a result, Zoospa’s musical elements feel cohesive, even as they bounce across genres and eras, often within the same song. The instrumental “Hyper Hibernate” evokes Steve Reich as a vaporwave artist, with marimba-esque synths that fall into a serene, orderly pattern, like a digitally rendered Ikebana arrangement. The intense squelches and trap hi-hats of “Team Effort” sound like the type of beat SOPHIE would produce for Charli XCX. Zoospa takes a more outwardly R&B turn on the Dawn Richard-featuring “Potions,” where pumping, respirating synths call to mind Nao’s collaborations with British producer Mura Masa. The frenzied amalgamation of genres is a natural progression for both Stewart and Edgar; the former enlisted versatile R&B vocalists like Richard and Jesse Boykins III for his 2016 Machinedrum record Human Energy, and the latter co-produced “745” on Vince Staples’ 2017 avant-garde dance rap opus Big Fish Theory.
But the real magic comes from the guest vocalists, who both match the bouncy dynamism of Stewart and Edgar’s productions and bring their own refreshingly weird energy. Mykki Blanco is in his element on “Play,” punching out some words with tenacity and morphing the pronunciation of others. “Get down with doggies, bet you got fleasies/Opp bitches lurkin’, they not my species,” he says, teasing sass from the final syllable of each bar. The standout “Real Truth” features rising Australian artist Tkay Maidza, who raps with a breezy candor. “I ain’t scared of a dude with a suit baggy,” she says, lending her own quirky flair to the inverted grammatical structure. Stewart and Edgar digitize her vocals until she sounds robotic, becoming one with the track’s synthetic elements.
Besides Big Fish Theory, Zoospa is also reminiscent of Flume’s latest Hi This Is Flume mixtape, which similarly weaves elaborately arranged instrumentals with appearances from inflammatory MCs slowthai and JPEGMAFIA. On both projects, the vocalists serve as inspiration and instrument, yet another reference point for their respective producers to chop up, mess with, and resituate. J-E-T-S play with elements from the past, but their take on future-pop aligns perfectly with today’s forward-thinking trends.
