Festival season is drawing to a close for another year. Late nights and early mornings, heavy heads and tired legs, feeling your way into the sounds and hidden corners both, spacial, and emotional. It’s that slightly strange range of experiences that is reflected in the latest release on Emotional Especial by Chez de Milo.
His is a name you don’t tend to overlook on a line up poster as a DJ. But, with his body of production work growing, eyes and ears need to be on alert for his own music. With ‘Et Al’, Chez has put together a deeply satisfying four tracker of trance inflected psychedelic dance music. As all festival experiences should, it caters for everyone, from the field and forest mushroom taker to the dance tent darkness dweller.
Title track, ‘Et Al’ is a top-ended bubbler, full of electrical delights and vocal snippets. It wasps its way into the eardrum with restless energy, based on a killer kick and upward spiralling hypnotic hook. Definitely one for that dusk time transition where day meets night.
‘Geiser’ takes on a more breakbeat feel, heading closer to the bottom end, but keeping that edgy tension fully intact. Acidic layers and skittering drums float over siren calls and indecipherable chants producing an effect that’s both enchanting and unsettling at the same time.
‘Kremer’ pushes the music deep into the dunes, placing Egyptian folk samples in a modern context, interlacing them with looser, more rugged and organic drum patterns. Desert music to bring some much needed heat to a wet English summer.
Closing the set is the psychedelic electro of ‘Thus One’. There are slightly sinister background vocals and rumbling effects taking the listener up and down while conversational samples add to the menace. It’s reminiscent of music past but adding a fresh spin to make it something new.
Like any weekender, it has to come to an end sometime. Melding influences from the acidic fields of Albion with hazy sands of North Africa to come up with something of his own.
‘Et Al’ is available now via Emotional Especial's Bandcamp
