XIN - Melts Into Love

After last year's EP-form “teaser” (“To Shock The Sky And Shake The Earth”, 2018), the anonymous entity Xin makes its long-distance debut with “Melts Into Love”, which pushes forward, with conviction, the bold path of post-club deconstruction it had embarked on.

Even more sinister and rumbling than its predecessor, the full-length warps electronic matter while keeping intact many of the rhythmic and timbral aspects of Idm and British bass music, drawing on the dense vocabularies of Autechre to craft bewildering syntheses that, though rooted in the imagery of rave subculture, keep a careful distance from the logic of the “danceable” and sink hands and feet into an uneasy dystopian landscape.

Between horror vacui and ecstasy, in “That There Is None” distorted noise shards cut through an artificial choir yearning for a balance that has long since been lost: a tormented sacred tension that aligns with the sonic territory in which, among others, Paul Jebanasam and Joshua Sabin have excelled, and which also draws Xin closer to the expressive realm that today characterizes much of the output of the Subtext label.

Chaotic structures spread across the acoustic space pull us into the eye of the storm with “Spent, Wasted And Saved”, the only track created in collaboration with Aya Sinclair (AYA, formerly LOFT), which helps fuel the collapse of the dizzying digital architecture. The dull thuds of “Declared Denied” seem to hack through the roar of a massive robotic creature, a further manifestation of a trance legacy that is disowning itself in order to evolve into a new form that is more ephemeral, hybrid and unclassifiable. So too the stupefying à-la Lorenzo Senni revival of “Ffantom Contendt” is submerged by high tides that dampen its frequencies, like a pulsing kaleidoscope slipping out of focus before our eyes.

“No Relief, No Perspective, No Vanishing Point”: once again an effective visual and emotional suggestion closes this first LP, in a magmatic, pseudo-techno seethe that denies any possible reconciliation with the unsettling scenario conceived and dismembered by Xin which, in the wake of the work in progress “Lexachast”, adds another significant piece to the complex and elusive mosaic of hi-tech electronics.

Following the example of the all-digital label Saplings, founded by Fis, all revenue from the sale of this album will be donated to Eden Reforestation Projects – every purchase amounts to at least 40 trees planted.

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01/10/2019