Few genres ride the cutting edge as efficiently and boldly as grime. Much like hip-hop, grime’s startlingly adventurous productions have often predicted the shapes and sounds that will bubble up from the underground and into the pop sector. Recent innovations from the likes of Rabit, Logos, Murlo, and Visionist have stretched grime’s boundaries, nudging the genre into ever more surreal and unexpected directions.
In 2014, Gobstopper label boss Mr. Mitch and London-based producer Yamaneko further solidified their places among this new wave, with the release of Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace, respectively. Parallel Memories contained gossamer textures and breathless tracts of negative space. Pixel Wave Embrace was animated by the idyllic moods and vivid colors of meditation tapes and video game soundtracks. Both pointed to a softer, slower, and sparser approach to a genre infamous for its whiplash juxtapositions and hardline tenacity.
Over the last year, Mitch and Yamaneko have been working intermittently on a joint project, Yaroze Dream Suite, the results of which are collected in this four-track EP. “There’s a Venn diagram where Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace meet and a lot of this project came from there,” Yamaneko has said, and for the most part that sentiment holds true. Opener “Pixel Dreams” sets the tone for the EP’s woozy, climate-controlled atmosphere. Built around a strikingly simple melody and spacey, shivering synth tones, the track is the most successful marriage of the two producers’ styles: Mitch’s love for cool, weightless minimalism and Yamaneko’s new age-mining ambience. Plinking chirps, video game sound FX, and trap-like snaps lend the song additional heft, but the outcome remains keenly delicate, dulcet.
Closer “Spirit Temple” is similarly jaunty—all skeletal beat programming and melodious synths. Like “Pixel Dreams,” it trades grime’s brute force for restraint, as its arrangements unspool slowly. This scenic take on grime allows the listener to zoom in on each component, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. “In the Moonlight,” featuring guest vocalist Hannah Mack, flutters with ghostly sirens, prodding synths, and a plaintive sax line; when Mack invites us to “Free your mind/‘Cuz everything’s sublime,” it underscores the EP’s central theme. This is grime engineered to float, not punch.
Despite the EP’s pillowy silhouettes and beguiling tempos—and several moments of outright bliss—Yaroze Dream Suite often falls prey to its own moderation. Where the duo’s solo releases come across meditative and understated, YDS occasionally scans as mild, and, at times, underdone. No where is this more apparent than on “Awakening,” a brooding cut chiseled from rumbling pads and disembodied vocals; it circles itself a half or so dozen times without going anywhere particularly surprising, or novel. The scope of the EP just feels smaller. Still, YDS remains fascinating throughout, and the question of how its ideas will shape the duo’s future output is enough to strike the interest of any grime diehard.
