- UK-style techno by way of the Miami underground, on a new Local Action imprint.
- It was only a matter of time before the bass music continuums of Miami and London started to collide. Both scenes favour polyrhythmic club experiments with an emphasis on how much weight you can pack into the lower frequencies. We got a taste of what this might sound like last year, when Pearson Sound added a ravey bassline to Nick León's world-conquering "Xtasis." But that was only a teaser. The two scenes properly come together on Coffintexts's Touch, which inaugurates London staple Local Action's latest imprint, Clasico, curated by ELEANOR. Across four tracks, Coffintexts brings together vintage techno and UK bass with the polyrhythmic heat of Miami club music.
The best producers coming out of Miami's underground right now—think INVT and Sel6, alongside León—love toying with traditional techno tropes. On Touch, Coffintexts works her way through plenty of old school motifs, from the dub techno chords on "Ur Body So Smooth" to the closed hi-hats on "Toxic" to the bassline—which dances like a boxer on the ropes in and out of the snares—on "Touch." Each of these tracks adds something to the formula: just check the UK funky swing on "Ur Body So Smooth" or the chest-rattling subs and start-and-stop rhythm of "Toxic." Yeah, this is techno, but this isn't techno for your average South Beach club. The outlier here is "Activo," which plays closer to Coffintexts' Latin heritage thanks to its syncopated hand drums and mosquito buzz.
Touch makes it clear that Coffintexts is a vital force of Miami's new guard. For the past couple of years she's been switching in and out of lanes as something of a genre-hopping polyglot—some jungle breaks with INVT here, vintage Miami bass there. But on last year's sprawling Homecore! Miami All-Stars compilation, she dialed things back with a stripped-down techno track complete with a haughty, haunted vocal sample and broken hand drum patterns. It felt like a new direction for her sound and made her stand out among the crowded field of the city's dance music stars past, present, and future. Touch is even better, a calling card for a producer set to skyrocket.
Tracklist01. Ur Body So Smooth
02. Touch
03. Toxic
04. Activo