If Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma are indeed more concerned with refining their sound than developing it, Folding Time is Sepalcure polished to a textureless patina of reference points. Nearly five years after their self-titled debut album marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—the duo's second full-length returns to that once vital style to find it rendered prosaic. “Inside me, inside of you/I've been going backwards,” sings Body Language's Angelica Bess amidst the swaying UK funky-lite of “Devil Inside.” It's surely all too perfect that she wraps up Folding Time's complications so succinctly, and yet the music's dearth of adventure can only be traced to an unflinching myopia.
Maybe it's unfair to fault a rose for having thorns: Sepalcure offered such a gorgeous example of pancultural electronica in 2011 that they have every reason to reclaim their past successes. Besides, “Pencil Pimp” and “The One” aren't being rinsed for nostalgia just yet, so why not transpose their clubby effervescence and disembodied soul to another colorful, balanced stretch of tunes? These guys certainly have the fans for it, and the kind of dubwise dynamism in “Hearts in Danger,” “Loosen Up,” and “Brother Forest” is a textbook execution of hybrid sensibilities made seamless. But when those ideas sound underexplored (“Dub Of”), detached (“Hurts So Bad”), or superfluous (“Ask Me”), it's as if Sepalcure see their self-imposed genre as exemplary in electronic music's constantly changing ecosystem.
Stewart and Sharma have said that Folding Time's writing process was like “connecting the present with the past…digging through old memories.” How listeners interface with the refurbished music hinges on their value of that past and the currency it holds. The vocal samples in these tracks offer a reliable barometer in that regard (nothing says 2010 UK bass like an Aaliyah stand-in tossed over some kick-and-stick). Both Sepalcure and their solo projects, Machinedrum and Braille, have always fixated on vocals—sampling the likes of Whitney Houston, Jocelyn Brown, Monica, and KC & JoJo, among others—so their heavy presence is no surprise here. Unlike the Burials and Four Tets and James Blakes out there, however, Sepalcure have never been much for abstraction, lifting lyrics and their sentiments wholesale (maybe pitched down a couple steps) instead of flipping them into a unique translation. “Not Gonna Make It” grabs the opening line of Gladys Knight's “Neither One of Us”; “Been So True” samples liberally from “Heard It All Before” by Sunshine Anderson; hooky and animated as they are, neither song manages to speak new meaning from the vibrant source material. Such handling of samples can relegate empowering and soul-searching music to props for a stunt.
Folding Time's original vocals meet that issue head on. Canadian singer Rochelle Jordan and Brooklynite Angelica Bess each give a nuanced, personalized performance that nudges the music into a pop context. Whiffs of SBTRKT and Bonobo linger in the lush, chilled-out motifs of “Fight for Us” and “Devil Inside,” but their dubby atmospheres and injured melodicism are Sepalcure hallmarks writ sync-friendly. The verse-chorus structures and downtempo arrangements don't offer a way forward for Stewart and Sharma so much as point towards an alternate space for their music to inhabit, well-adjusted and respectably commercial. Likewise, Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.
