Zomby - One Foot Ahead Of The Other EP

Ramp Records has announced it will be releasing One Foot Ahead Of The Other, the latest EP from 'wonky'/aquacrunk/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-step pioneer Zomby. Since the release last year of his fantastic rave tribute Where Were U In '92 - an album Animal Collective subsequently revealed themselves to be fans of when they played it as interval music at their Koko gig in January – his self-titled EP on Hyperdub has already become something of a genre classic, garnering praise from areas of the press well outside the usual niche dance music circles.

One Foot Ahead Of The Other will be released sometime in August and the tracklist will run like this:

One Foot Ahead Of The Other
Helter Skelter
Pumpkinhead’s Revenge
Polka Dot
Godzilla
Expert Tuition
Bubble Bobble
Mescaline Cola
Firefly Finale

After Simon Reynold’s hotly debated ‘ketamine music’ article in the Guardian a few months ago, in which he drew an aesthetic connection between Zomby’s productions and K’s loosely dissociative effects – an aural connection I don’t agree with but was at least slightly understandable in the Hyperdub EP’s unquantised, ghostly breaks and aquatic, gloopy bass – the tracks that have thus far surfaced are less immediately classifiable as ‘w***y.’ A recent, rare interview gave a little more idea of his wide-ranging influences; he’s obviously a man with very varied music taste and if he’s listening to stuff on Paw Tracks, US indie and noise as well as the more self-evident UK dance this seems likely to have impacted far more on his music than any drug. That said, Animal Collective’s favourite of his remixes for them was made whilst spannered on psychotropics.



On his Rinse FM shows, Blackdown has recently been playing short mini-mixes of new Zomby tracks which, whilst displaying his distinctive hallmarks are increasingly vibrant and melody-led, washes of bright synth quite apart from the Hyperdub EP’s suffocating density and closer to the technicolour explosions of ‘Strange Fruit’ and ‘Rumours and Revelations’. The most recent of the new EP’s tracks to emerge, ‘Godzilla’ is more closely aligned to his dubstep contemporaries, ascending arpeggiated synths reminiscent of Skream’s ‘0800 Dub’ or Rustie’s remix of ‘Spliff Dub’. It’s the best thing he’s done in ages – August can’t come soon enough.