Not long after Martyn Deykers had a heart attack, in 2017, he was listening to an album by jazz drummer Max Roach when he discovered an unusual side effect of returning from the brink of death. “It was like I could hear more space in the music,” he said. “It was almost 3D hearing.” The artist known simply as Martyn can count his blessings twice: first, for surviving the cardiac event, and second, for discovering how to harness that newfound energy for his own work. Music for Existing is not his first album since the heart attack; that was 2018’s Voids. But Music for Existing marks the first time that he has accessed such a dynamic, almost extrasensory perception of depth. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also the first time he has definitively abandoned dance music’s strictures in search of unbridled stylistic freedom. Martyn has been in the game for more than two decades, but Music for Existing feels like a rebirth.
Though the Dutch-born, D.C.-based musician got his start making drum’n’bass, his name is most closely associated with the spirit of hybridization that followed dubstep’s UK explosion. Martyn was a key figure in the late 2000s’ dubstep/techno crossover, and his versatility led to records on both Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder and Berghain’s Ostgut Ton. His signature fusion of lush, dusky chords and muscular percussion remained consistent from early singles like 2008’s “Vancouver” all the way up to Voids. But Music for Existing, while rooted in the bass-music tradition, is different. He’s still thinking like a jungle producer, cutting up his drums and carving out labyrinthine bass grooves. But much of his source material this time comes from acoustic instruments: keyboards, cello, guitar, live drums. And there’s another crucial difference: While Martyn crafted the album on his computer, in the solitary fashion of most electronic producers, he relied on a network of friends and peers around the world to inject the music’s lifeblood.
The shift in methodology is immediately apparent from the opening bars of the first track, “Heavy Sound”: Instead of programmed drums or conventional breakbeats, the song begins with a cloudburst of cymbals and toms from drummer Mischa Porte. When the groove kicks in a few measures later, ragged hi-hats keeping time against a growling Reese bassline, it’s as much jazz as dance music—which is to say, a reminder that jazz was historically a music of swerving limbs in sweaty rooms. (Here and throughout the record, the influence of broken-beat artists like 4 Hero and American fusionists like Theo Parrish looms large.) Things turn even jazzier a couple minutes in, when trumpeter Cees Bruinsma lays down the song’s ruminative central riff before veering off into exploratory flights of fancy. Around him, Porte’s drums and Martyn’s synths and effects drift and glide; the repetitive structure is reminiscent of club music, but the perpetual slippage signals more dynamic ways of moving.
Despite a handful of boldface names in the credits—Porte, Bruinsma, keyboardist Duval Timothy, cellist Lucinda Chua—Music for Existing isn’t really a solo album peppered with features; it’s more like an epistolary collage. To create the record, Martyn sent his friends brief sketches of ideas he’d worked up in the studio; once they sent back their own contributions, he set about cobbling it all together, cutting and rearranging to his heart’s content. That approach helps give the record its unusually loose rhythmic feel. Nothing feels snapped to an arbitrary grid; while the tempo doesn’t vary from bar to bar, what happens in between the downbeats flows as only human playing can.
Some songs are relatively straightforward: Timothy’s instantly recognizable chords form the watery backdrop of “No One Plays the Game,” freeing up Martyn to dig a serpentine drum groove and overlay melancholy scraps of horn. But others are more intricate. “Whiplashed” at first sounds like a three-way face-off between Porte’s drumming, circular riffing from saxophonist Mark Cisneros (Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, Chain and the Gang, Deathfix), and Martyn’s almost subliminal bass pressure. Listen closely, though, and there’s a lot more going on: wandering vibraphones, bursts of dubwise effects, and drum parts cut up and interwoven in a way that gives the impression of a superhuman percussionist, an octopus with sticks. Tracks like “Whiplashed” may move like they were recorded live in a room, but slip inside their polyrhythmic matrix and it becomes clear how much they owe to Martyn’s nuanced scalpel work.
That complexity is true even of the tracks that hew more closely to traditional dance-music sounds. In the jungle-inspired “Hypnotoxic Laser,” Martyn avails himself of a sound reminiscent of the “Think” break, a staple of hip-hop and jungle. Carefully repitching and flanging its shuffling snares and tambourines, he fleshes out the break with diamantine cowbell sounds so vivid, it feels like you could reach out touch them; it’s a dazzling instance of giving new life to the most shopworn standard. “Phantom Jazz” is an equally audacious feat of sound design. The latter term is often invoked to signify a certain kind of high-tech digital sheen, a futuristic mode of world-building, but here Martyn does the opposite, taking the sound of a standup bass and whittling it down until you can practically feel the resin on your fingers. With every pluck, the strings seem to vibrate in the air in front of you, blurring like bees’ wings. If you ever wondered what hearing more space in the music might mean, that’s it right there.
“I want to make music till I’m very old,” Martyn recently said. “And the music I make has to connect with who I am as a person, and I’m not 20 years old anymore. … That doesn’t mean my music now is boring and old, but I do think your personality and where you are in life should be reflected in the music.” What might be most invigorating about Music for Existing is the way that it draws on the tropes of club music—Martyn’s stomping ground for the past 20-odd years—without passing as a fantasy of club music. That is, unlike so much electronic music intended for home listening, it’s not meant to make the listener imagine an idealized dancefloor for which the music is supposedly intended. Music for Existing presents its own three-dimensional world, self-contained and self-sufficient. It is as though in finding more space in the music, Martyn has found more space for himself—to move about, test his limbs, and find out what he’s capable of.
