As a DJ who co-founded the well-connected Hoya:Hoya club night in Manchester, Ryan Hunn is eager to let us know that his first full-length Illum Sphere LP is "deliberately and uncompromisingly conceived as a full length record," not a beat mix with its time gone wonky. He needn't worry: No one would mistake Ghosts of Then and Now for a shot at dance floor domination. These 13 tracks are relentlessly eclectic, intricately detailed, and filled with sprung rhythms. Drum'n'bass, techno, glitch, footwork, electronic soul, and hard-knocking hip-hop are all subjected to deconstructive treatments in the cerebral Brainfeeder style and artfully blended with live instruments that can edge toward jazz. It's the kind of record that makes you wonder, "How did we get here?" and skip back to find out, marveling at the seamlessness of the flux.
Gradually, a pattern, or at least a set of predilections, emerges from the controlled chaos. Hunn likes heavy basses that melt and bend, adding kinks and curves to his rhythmic structures. He quietly layers soulful voices by Mai Nestor on the R&B/techno hybrid "At Night" and likes to bridge distant extremes—say, a tectonic bass with a frilly piano. Thin, taut drum patterns are mixed with arpeggiated chord progressions and syncopated with all manner of little gasps and wheezes and squeaks. He likes to capture kaleidoscopic tones and timbres in slantwise grooves that hold their own tension rather than chasing a metronome, and there is definitely an element of technical showmanship driving the album.
Hunn is an adept mixer, and he plays the long game in a way that rewards close listening. The record's high-intensity passages blend so smoothly with the atmospheric stuff—the Burial-like "The Road", the detuned piano and churchy organs of the title track, the gentle tropical delirium of "Ra_Light"—that you scarcely notice where one mode lets off and the other begins. Throughout, he maintains a fine-grained but tough economy of sound, and only with the last three tracks or so does his attentiveness seem to waver. "Lights Out/In Shinjuku" reminds us of the kind of aimless FX odyssey and rhythmic gymnastics this kind of ambitiously eclectic, skill-showing approach can devolve to, but seldom does on Illum Sphere’s impressive full-length debut.
