Horchata - Basidia
While Mick Harris gave birth to the subterranean basso terror movement with his Scorn project, it has been the dark hop and illbient children who have kept the movement alive. Mike Palace records as Horchata and his second solo disc, Basidia, is ambient music with menace, blissful atmospheres tainted with the apprehension that something -- somewhere -- has gone wrong.
"Anamorph" slinks along like a biomechanically modified leopard, the soft pads of its paws sounding like wire brushes on a drum head. Tiny burrs of noise like the creature's velvet purr come and go over the wave motion of the synthesizers. There is nothing hurried about the way "Anamorph" stalks you. It slinks around the room as if it has all eternity to wait for you to fall asleep. "Somatic" gets under your skin like a morphine drip, static fogging the edges of your brain and blurring the colored arc of the ambient tones. Horchata builds aquatic dream landscapes, oceans of sound that are time-stamped with the perpetual motion of slumbering rhythms and tinged with the echo of ancestral voices.
"Mychorrhizae" hums with the fine static of electronic cicadas and invokes the sea air with its field recording from the deck of a wooden boat. Tiny clusters of percussion sneak about the deserted vessel as the ambient mood becomes thick with slow moving air. This is like being caught in the horse latitudes, drifting aimlessly with no current and no wind to propel your craft. "Demicyclic" grabs this same atmosphere -- this sense of dread-filled heat mirages -- and sends it scampering, strapped to the back of an illbient beast.
The illbient beast is present in full force in "Cyst" as the percussion moves to the foreground. The room isn't large enough to hold its shape and the persistent hammer of its beats will eventually bring down the walls. The defining element of the dark hop beat is its pace -- how its glacial (as compared to tech-step or gabber) BPM is a combination of time-lapse syncopation and dub echo -- and "Cyst" is a delicious slab of the thick and dark stuff. "Acervulus" skitters on the edge of something faster, some flavor nearly IDM, but is still constrained by the weight of its low end. Try as it might, this bird is never going to fly, but that doesn't keep you from breathlessly urging it on.
Basidia doesn't remain still. Horchata is motion, finding new ways to attach slow and heavy beats to ambient melodies and fistfuls of particulate noise. Basidia is mood music for the hour after sunset when the sky isn't completely black and the night creatures aren't completely awake. But they are stirring.
Horchata
Ad Noiseam [2004]
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