When Bournemouth, UK-based producer BNJMN burst onto the scene with "Blocks" last year, its beauty was as tantalizing as the lack of details surrounding its release. It came out on an Amsterdam-only 12" with little clue as to "BNJMN"'s identity. What we did have to go on was the gorgeous music carved into those grooves: All woozy arpeggios and fuzzy chiming chords, the track felt both majestically modern yet mournfully nostalgic, a lost artifact worn as much by time as by digital filters. It was an odd fit for a label known best for its comprehensive house reissue series, but Benjamin Thomas' debut album, Plastic World, revealed how deep "Blocks"'s nostalgia went.
Plastic World, an album mixing soft-focus IDM introspection with the ongoing house and hip-hop flirtations of so much contemporary "bass music," more than lived up to the promise of "Blocks". Thomas' formula felt more natural than most. What was also striking about BNJMN was not just that he nailed his reference points (ambient and bleep techno, early Warp Records), but that he had little disregard for what was going on around him aside from what he could and lift and mould to his own specifications. Even when he was playing with familiar structures-- sometimes he sounded like Teebs, other times he sounded like early Autechre-- there was something wonderfully private about it all, as if he were coming at these ideas from behind some impenetrable screen of idiosyncrasy. It was a 40-minute album that easily swelled beyond its own meager confines, a spontaneous overflow of engaging musical ideas that managed to carve a palpable pocket into an overcrowded scene even as it stared in from the borderlands.
Released bewilderingly quickly-- only eight months after its predecessor-- Black Square finds its own success in the reduction of nearly everything that made Plastic World so appealing. Much like the bare cover art, the music methodically removes the extraneous elements from Thomas' deliberately blurry sound and leaves every cog in the machine starkly visible. Even in a realm where repetition is the rule, there's something about Thomas' work that can feel especially rigid: On Plastic World it was a smearing effect that created a dreamy swirl; on Black Square we feel all the ugly edges and jagged rims. The mechanic has a lot in common with producers currently experimenting with footwork forms and other uptempo musics: Take "Keep the Power Out", where a harshly chopped vocal phrase and persistently ticking rimshot fashion a symphony of frantic monotony. The effect is still as hypnotic and engrossing as ever, but this time it feels more tactile and real, easier to grasp in its dressed-down guise.
It's this new naked physicality that makes Black Square an even more exciting prospect than past work. Thomas wields the kick drum like a mighty weapon, and the way the record moves from the wooden clack of "Primal Pathways" to its midpoint climax of "Open the Floodgates" is spectacular. We're given hints with the pulse underneath tracks like the whimsical "Wisdom of Uncertainty" and the Velvet Underground-sampling title track, but when that simple kick drops a minute into "Floodgates", it's the weight of the real world, the weight of true dance music crashing into BNJMN's cultivated electronica fantasies. It's a formidable strike that highlights texture as Black Square's most important element: The tracks thereafter feel like a hangover from the relative abandon of "Floodgates", but they're rich and sensual. The dulcet tones, flinty synths, and buoyant guitars of "Lava" are an aural feast, and closer "Hallowed Road" is a teasingly sparse disintegration that unwinds the album through resonance and hum-and-buzz, the undoing of the bubbly melodies that were the erstwhile dominant force in Thomas' compositions.
Black Square is definitely not a retread of Plastic World, but it's not the predictable expand-and-improve sophomore effort either. It's a brave sort of refinement that brings what was special about Plastic World into even finer relief: Brimming with opposing currents, from nostalgia to fantasy to decadence and dread, Black Square is not the simple world it appears to be at first, yet it's simple enough to digest. At 32 minutes, it makes a heavier indent than its lengthier sibling and is a more assured statement than most dance albums. It doesn't matter that it comes on one of house music's most lauded archival labels, because BNJMN's music is timeless, and it belongs on an imprint known for securing dance music history rather than one focused on its trendy and fickle future.
