- Lumigraph's Nautically Inclined on Opal Tapes embodied a rusty take on house and techno, a familiar sound to anyone who's followed dance music's recent infatuation with muck and grit. All of which makes the opening, self-titled track on the Yacht Cruiser EP even more surprising. It's a languid, smooth house track composed of the simplest of building blocks—an acid synth figure, a high string loop and sparse percussion. A pitched-down vocal sample takes so long to enter that when it does it feels sneaky, introducing grit to the otherwise serene track.
"Playing By Numbers" and "Cape Horn" are closer to what you expect from the artist. Dense with mangled vocal samples, a volatile stop-start bassline, granular textures and off-kilter percussion, "Playing By Numbers" is still barely dance music, its sense of motion bubbling under the surface rather than charging forward. "Cape Horn," on the other hand, also fizzes with static and clattering percussion but its higher tempo and deep thumps mean it's the closest Yacht Cruiser has to techno proper. "Small Doses" is as idiosyncratic as "Cape Horn" but as slick as "Yacht Cruiser," a web of watery synth squiggles and propulsive bassline. The dialectic of dance music dictates that for every movement there's a countermovement, and though Yacht Cruiser may not be the antithesis of the raw-sounding analogue house and techno, it's an interesting glimpse into what might come next.
Tracklist A1 Yacht Cruiser
A2 Playing My Numbers
B1 Capehorn
B2 Small Doses