Africa HiTech's Mark Pritchard and Steve White have really come correct with a full-length of bashy dubstep, funky and hip-hop variants. From his days in Global Communication, Jedi Knights et to his more recent Hyperdub / Harmonic 313 outings, Pritchard's beat-building pedigree is second to none, and having skirted on the periphery of the contemporary UK bass scene for the past couple of years he's now turned out the substantial statement he was threatening to make - aided and abetted by the nu-jazz nous of the man they used to called Steve Spacek. The opening title track is just boss, an accumulation of techy synth washes and rugged drum syncopation - imagine Omar-S if he'd grown up in Croydon instead of Detroit. The ghetto twitch of 'Out In The Streets' sits comfortably alongside recent Night Slugs and Pearson Sound productions; with their aquatic subs, wheedling synth tones and ultra-criss claps, 'Future Moves', Footstep' and 'Glangslap' sound like polished takes on the kind of grime Slimzee used to spin in Pay As U Go (no higher recommendation than that). Following a lurch into dreamy Timbaland-meets-Drexciya synth-funk on 'Our Luv', 'Light The Way' invests a trad dubstep riddim with Fourth World texture and unease, while 'Spirit' and 'Do You Wanna Fight' reimagine UK garage as ethno-psychedelia, the latter bolstered with heavy vocoder usage and Eski horn parps. The closing double-punch of 'Cyclic Sun and 'Don't Fight It' is just beautiful, channelling Ethio-jazz, Congotronics drums, cinematic strings and Rhythm & Sound-style dub discipline into a sun-kissed hybrid that's just begging to soundtrack your summer months.
