For a producer who's been doing exciting things in bass music over the past year, Travis Stewart's musical origins are barely traceable to the genre. Never mind that the beginnings of his catalog as Machinedrum predate the genre's ongoing cultural flashpoint by a decade-- until his recent move to Berlin, the geographical space between him and the largely UK-based sound was vast. Ideologically, however, Stewart's attraction to bass music makes perfect sense. Over the past decade, he's subtly shifted from misty downtempo to Prefuse 73-reminiscent glitch-hop to the sort of Dilla-fied beat ooze that refuses to go out of style. His 2010 release with the Glasgow label LuckyMe was titled Many Faces, and the title seemed apt. As a solo artist, Stewart doesn't like to stay in one place long.
As Andrew Gaerig put it in his review of Stewart's fantastic debut LP with fellow producer Praveen Sharma (aka Braille) as Sepalcure, "bass producers tend to treat innovation like daily prayer." At one time, it would have been difficult to call Stewart as an innovator, but then he released last year's Room(s) on the similarly hard-to-pin-down label Planet Mu. It was a heady, sensual trip through the smeared-vocal technique that most first encountered on Burial's 2007 breakthrough Untrue, incorporating the repetitive rhythmic kicks of footwork and coating it in atmosphere. The whole thing was an overwhelming swarm of sound, more in line with the maximalist trends in electronic music discussed in Simon Reynolds' recent "Maximal Nation" piece. Compared to the marbled elegance of Sepalcure, Room(s) is garish and cheeky, but you can't deny the album's utter audaciousness.
Relative to his work last year, Stewart's new EP on LuckyMe, SXLND, is a minor effort. Stylistically, the five songs on SXLND lie somewhere between Stewart's work on Room(s) and Sepalcure, with slight variations-- the former's clipped strangulations are backed by a spare, funky gallop on the title track, while "No Respect" and closer "DDD" take the latter's smooth alleyway hymns out to the club, courtesy of a steady 4/4 thump. Instead of pushing things forward, he's making lateral moves.
The most notable thing about SXLND is the fact that its title track's serves as the backbone for rapper Azealia Banks' latest single, "NEEDSUMLUV". Heard here without her contribution, it indeed sounds like a backing track. And that's the main issue with SXLND as a whole: There aren't enough standalong tracks, just a collection of tunes that would sound great stuck in the middle of a solid DJ set (see, for instance, Stewart's recent FADER mix, where the EP's material hit much harder than when isolated here). So this is one for committed fans, those who've been following along with Stewart's recent renaissance and trying to guess what his next move will be.
