Leon Smart might not quite have the profile of Hyperdub’s bigger names, the likes of Laurel Halo and Burial, but it’s hard to think of a figure more emblematic of the UK label’s mission to short-circuit the familiar rhythms and grooves of dance music. As DVA, Smart came up through London’s grime scene, producing for figures like Wiley and becoming a familiar face at Rinse FM, where he was an energetic presence at the helm of the former pirate station’s Grimey Breakfast Show. For all this, Smart’s own productions have increasingly shunned category, exploring a liminal space between grime, house and UK funky—a space that, for want of a better term, we might as well call Hyperdub music.
This is Smart’s first full-length album going under new handle DVA [Hi:Emotions], and it marks a break of sorts from what has come before. For one, there is a broad concept here—one encompassing, among other things, techno-futurism, corporate branding, and the interface between humans and machines. With this shift into conceptual territory comes a shift towards abstraction. These are not straightforward club tracks; Smart says he composed them in the dark, illuminated by the glow of his computer monitor—a process designed to emulate his early experiences as a music listener, headphones on beneath a duvet after lights-out. NOTU_URONLINEU is seldom functional, in that way that great dance music can often be, but it uses its conceptual grounding as a springboard to explore all manner of strange hybrids and surprising possibilities.
The album’s sound is initially rather alien—relatively sparse, often light in bass frequencies, and characterized by twitchy rhythms, synth washes and all manner of blips and whooshes that ping around in the high registers. It can be body-moving stuff—most obviously on enjoyable “DAFUQ,” a cartoonish melding of TNGHT-style horn blasts, dubstep lollops and angelic arpeggios. Elsewhere, tracks combine unusual textural and rhythmic motifs. “SUZHOU” and “B IT” contain fragments of familiar genres—the frantic repetitions of footwork, the glossy sheen of vaporwave—but wriggle free of any familiar niche. Sometimes a voice will float through the mix, dispensing corporate soundbites and endorsing a fictional product line called “Hi:Emotions” with uncanny-valley chirpiness. “Have you ever been lost in translation or misunderstood in emails?” asks one. “Have you had a friendship end over the tone of your texts?”
In the hands of some, this sort of conceptual conceit might be the seeds of a grim sci-fi dystopia; the robots taking over. But NOTU_URONLINEU explores its themes with delicate nuance, smearing the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self. “ALMOSTU,” featuring guest vocalists Rae Rae and Roses Gabor, is quiet storm R&B going out to a lover who may be merely virtual; while a particularly slippery eight-minute track titled “NOTU_URONLINEU” lines up slashing rhythms, blasts of modular synth slurry and an unexpected but delightful segment of Rhodes piano played by collaborator Danalogue that gives the track a twinkly jazz-funk flavor, like Herbie Hancock popping up in the middle of an Autechre workout. Throughout the track, a relationship drama plays out. “What’s wrong? I know something’s wrong,” it begins. It ends: “I don’t love you anymore.” It goes on to say, “I knew that wasn’t gonna sound good.”
NOTU_URONLINEU feels of a piece with recent concept-powered projects like Kode9’s Nothing or Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise’s modular project the Sprawl—a sort of speculative fiction in sound, mapping out a space of future possibilities. It feels somewhat embryonic in places, as if some of its ideas remain fragmentary or incomplete. But, importantly for an album grappling with ideas of identity, we never lose sight of Smart amidst his concept. Wait a few seconds after the album’s closing track (excluding the brief bonus song) and we’re beamed right into his studio, can hear him sniffling and exhaling as beats ping from the speakers and one of the album’s sales drones delivers a pitch: “Have you ever made up a song in your head but didn’t have the skills to execute it?” It’s tempting to imagine Smart posed this very question to himself, before rolling up his sleeves and resolving to do something about it. The result is a vision of a prospective future both strange and alluring, a journey through virtual spaces and experimental technologies that, at heart, feels human after all.
