LE JARDIN DES CHEMINS BIFURQUANTS by HIEROGLYPHIC BEING

Comes in generic white outersleeve now! Jamal Moss is a house music producer but his influences run deep, from classic Industrial and Sun Ra to New Age mysticism and occult knowledge. Even his most beat-driven, dancefloor-ready productions slip the shackles of four-onthe-floor and hackneyed melody. The two side-long pieces on this album forgo overt drum patterns altogether, but the rest of Moss’s hallmarks are all in place: the distorted bass thump, hazy chords and layers of bleeping, rhythmic earworms all cobbled into a crude sense of form, one that’s more about decentred pulse than logical development or easy peaks and comedowns.And it’s this lack of a centre that makes Moss’s music so striking. “Rhythmes Circadiens” never settles on a single path, as short chirping sequences flutter around dark, ominous chords and robotic thrusts. The listener is left to imagine the rhythmic tissue that connects these disparate elements. The B side, “The Garden Of Forking Paths”, pushes the contrast so far that the piece comes to occupy parallel worlds. A crunching, distorted riff – played on a keyboard but sounding lifted from a Metal record – threatens to engulf a taut helix of pinpoint synthesizer tones. (Matt Wuethrich, The Wire, December 2011)