- Planet Mu may be rooted in IDM—it's run, of course, by Mike Paradinas, AKA µ-Ziq, so it'd have to be—but many of its best releases over the past half-decade have been more or less straightforward examples of the hardcore continuum, from Neil Landstrumm's affectionate look-backs to early rave to the heavy, ear-grabbing dubstep of Pinch's "Qawwali" and Distance's My Demons to this lovely three-song 2-step 12-inch.
"Phreaqaflex" is New Yorker Drew Lustman, AKA FaltyDL, in high 2-step gear—most of the track bounces along on a keyboard riff whose tone is champagne-bubbly. But that's broken up about two-thirds in when that riff switches to something closer to the cheap swarm of proto-jungle. It's a subtle transition, albeit one that signals the producer's canniness about his roots. "Because You" uses the same basic template, but its eerie echoed-and-faded vocal samples, fussier beat programming and sparser keyboard lines are more in line with the cooler dubs that typified 2-step's turn-of-the-'00s peak. The real killer, though, is "My Friends Will Always Say..." This one is in less of a hurry than the other two, which benefits it: Lustman filters nearly everything in the track at some point, but it's spice rather than the main ingredient, especially when a fuzzy Delfonics sample brings things to a neat climax.
Tracklist A1 Phreqaflex
A2 Because You
B My Friends Will Always Say...