- Give a track to Sharp Veins and chances are he'll hand back something you don't recognize. The Alabama producer fits somewhere in the crop of new grime producers, but his work comes from a different place—he's the kind of guy who can turn a Young Thug track into a 13-minute ambient techno journey, or chop up a pop track so thinly you have to sift for traces of the original. Even more exciting was his Functions Of The Now mix, which took a series that focused on cutting-edge club sounds and steered it towards Grouper, Steve Roach and La Monte Young. Formerly producing as William Skeng, it's the Sharp Veins project where the young American's original productions have really come alive. On his debut for Dublin's Glacial Sound, Inbox Island, he lives up to the talk that's been following him around in grime circles over the past six months.
The theme of Inbox Island is escapism—more specifically, an escape from the mind-numbing world of computer screens and the internet. There's something vaguely distant and exotic about the title track, floating along like a daydream without ever quite touching the ground. It's an ornate take on grime with all the heavy support beams removed. Sharp Veins avoids structuring his tracks around big drops or climaxes, and instead lets them loop meditatively. "Water Logged" is laid-back trap built around a single piano sample, while "Tanzawa II" brings church bells into the frame. Rather than focusing on their more epic qualities he zeroes in on the resonance and decay, fine-tuning the details to the point where minuscule variations become seismic shifts.
There are bigger moments on the EP. "2 Bad So Sad" centres on a big, dusty percussion loop, all fogged up like a Clams Casino tune, and "Missing Sun" is the one moment that directly engages with grime tropes, built on big brass notes and barbed-wire basslines that bring out shades of Slackk. But even this one is gutted by a near-silent breakdown, followed by a fake fade-out that'll make you check the pause button. It's just one example of Sharp Veins doing a lot with very little.
TracklistA1 Inbox Island
A2 Water Logged
A3 2 Bad So Sad
B1 Missing Sun
B2 Tanzawa II
B3 The Seeing Palm