“For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects.
Though a sly sense of humor runs through Whipple’s productions, there’s also an unwavering sincerity. On Piteous Gate, this quality felt distinctly cinematic—interested, maybe, in its own artifice—but with Hesaitix he builds a world that lives and breathes. Though the album is anchored by percussive epics, Whipple uses uneasy ambient passages to carve out the environment in which Hesaitix takes place. Opener “Nemorum Incola” (whose title, per a rough translation from the Latin, means “forest dweller”), layers a rippling metallic phrase over a sample of insects, birds, and burbling water. “Blurred Cicada I” and “Blurred Cicada II” each recall the warbling sound of bells or an organ, stretched to woozy effect. These songs open up strange corners, lending a sense of the cavernous: the place we’ve entered seems to exist beyond what we can hear.
Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world.
I think of video games as a touchstone for Whipple’s high-definition world-building—the environments he creates often glossy and fantastical—but the organic realism of landscape painting also comes to mind. Work that’s technologically engaged often equates the organic with the real and the synthetic with imaginary; Whipple seems unconcerned with such binaries, locating a lucid unreality throughout. Hesaitix contains some of the earthiest dance music I’ve encountered, but that’s not to say that listening to it is a particularly human experience. And yet, this release has a strong sense of a center: a thoughtfulness comes from both its moments of fury and its more level interludes, as with “Ihnaemiauimx,” the sweet note on which the album concludes. It’s peaceful in a dark-night kind of way, the kind of serenity that can only be achieved through some comfort with the unknown.
Though there’s an impulse to process this sort of sonic radicality in ideological terms (take, for instance, a recent editorial for Resident Advisor that charted the popularity of CDJs among Whipple and his peers along a Jamesonian conception of postmodernity), I can’t help but believe that the implications of the forms mapped here are somehow more mysterious. Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form.
