- Taraval's music is right at home on Text Records: big room-friendly but with idiosyncratic touches, it's just the sort of thing you can imagine Four Tet playing to a festival crowd. II doesn't mess with the formula established on the San Francisco producer's previous EP, 2014's Streetways. Only these four tracks are a little more polished, and they lean away from soulful, sample-led house towards steelier techno. Both sides of the Taraval sound are present, though, and sometimes in one track. "Where's Leon?" starts as a relentless warehouse banger, before regrouping around a moody Rhodes loop lifted from Leon Ware's "That's Why I Came To California."
The rest of the EP follows more predictable paths. "Texler Acid" is slick acid techno, not a thousand miles from the rubbery minimalism of latter-day Plastikman. The way the filtered chords and clipped vocal samples of "Bart's Sanctuary" bounce off its booming kick drum suggests Artwork's Grain project, albeit with a ton of extra reverb and a cruder sense of groove. "Opal Cliffs" cools off with minor-key chords and pulsing broken-beat rhythms.
TracklistA1 Where's Leon?
A2 Texler Acid
B1 Bart's Sanctuary
B2 Opal Cliffs