Concentric Pleasures: Purple and Planet Mu

Photo by Sabine Mirlesse

Purple is gaining traction. No, I don't mean that Caterpillar has released a line of pastel backhoes. Rather, a handful of slippery synaesthetes on dubstep's margins have fixed upon the term to describe their garish perversions of the form. Throwing fluorescent G-funk leads over swollen, drunken drum programming, these mischievous types excel at combining brash hooks with beats that happily flaunt dubstep convention; with their video-game blips and almost comical riffs, they turn rebellion into child's play.

The Guardian's Dan Hancox recently profiled the Bristol trio leading the lilac revolution: Gemmy, Guido and Joker. Gemmy's recent "Supligen" single offers a good approximation of the form. Steeped in 8-bit blips, it stacks cheap, buzzy synth lines one atop the other until they mass into something almost rich, like creamed plastic. Neither beat on the record is quite as out-there as the pulses conjured by artists like Untold and Ramadanman (both of whom you can hear on the ~scape label's Round Black Ghosts). But there's a cheeky insouciance to his cadence, which goes glide, glide, splat over and over.

The label responsible, Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu, is a major force behind some of the most exciting sounds in "bass music" right now. Planet Mu has been tossing spanners in the breakbeat works for 14 years, across jungle, breakcore, IDM and grime. With recent releases from Boxcutter, Pinch, Neil Landstrumm, Jamie Vex'd and others, it has paralleled the elliptical orbit of Kode9's Hyperdub label around the outer edges of dubstep's stratosphere. New Yorker FaltyDL is the latest to enter the fold, and his Love Is a Liability is a corker, encompassing fizzy 2-step skip, smothering bass, melancholic sampladelia and synth melodies that verge on the baroque. As with Burial or Landstrumm, there's a palpable sense of nostalgia on tracks like the garage-y "Human Meadow" and "Dionysos," but like those artists, he's got a way with blending sound that's all his own. Just listen to "Enuia," which splits the difference between Rephlex and ECM in its water-drop rhythms and billowing acoustic ambiance.

FaltyDL's Human Meadow Remixes EP is also worth your time. Boxcutter, Luke Vibert and Mu-Ziq (aka label boss Mike Paradinas) all deliver radically different reworks, from Vibert's unabashed acid-house/Italo-disco mashup to Boxcutter's glazed rainbow crumble. (Honestly, I don't know what to call it; it sounds like the kind of music that, in the future, will serenade spaceship greenhouses, the 23rd-century equivalent of Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants, perhaps). But my favorite is Mu-Ziq's remix, which employs a breakbeat so slow, you'd be reaching for the 33/45 switch if you were listening to vinyl. Lush, dubby synth bass saunters beneath like a cat rubbing table legs, and sped-up vox are run through cistern reverb, with a net effect akin to floating in space, filled with helium yourself.

For all these and more recent Planet Mu madness, check the playlist below.