Coyote – I Hear A New World | Higher Love Recordings | 24th July 2023

Coyote, those effervescent eclectic veterans, with a love of dub, and a history of spinning arms-in-the-air / dance-on-the-bar house, have hooked-up with Brighton’s Higher Love Recordings for a fantastic new E.P. The duo, aka Timm Sure and Richard “Ampo” Hampson, themselves founders of the long-running label, Is It Balearic?, here hand over five, fresh, downtempo delights.

Most of the tracks feature some fine fretwork, treated to varying degrees, and a few of them are peppered with the pair’s characteristic sampled spoken word and movie dialogue. Adding to the music’s introspective effect. After All These Years, for example, lifts a quote from Matthew McConaughey’s mesmerizing performance in the first season of HBO’s True Detective, to convey a sense of calm, and self-growth. “I know who I am… There’s a victory in that.” The track itself a trip-hop-tastic, Country-fied, skank. A combination of acoustic campfire strum, tumbling funky trap drumming, washes of warm synths, and cool jazzy contrabass. Mr. McConaughey philosophizing some while you watch the night sky and count stars.

Blowing Through borrows a Charles Bukowski poem. The old soak’s sentimental side showing on the classic piece, Bluebird. Explaining how, as a “hard man”, he has to keep his true feelings locked away. Confessing that he only lets them out “at night sometimes, when everyone’s asleep.” Repeating the line, “Don’t be sad, Don’t be sad.” The Is It Balearic? boys set this to a mix of bucolically bopping electronic b-line and soaring, looped indie-guitar jangle. The result, an Ultramarine-like conjuring of summer. A pastoral take on Porter Ricks’ classic dub techno oddity, Explore.

Techno and IDM are actually hinted at throughout the E.P. It’s there in the squeezed and serrated detail. These intricacies indicating a change in the duo’s production practices. Where frequencies are more fragmented, and it harder to discern their original source. A more sophisticated sound design. More serious. Less stoned.

On Butterflies, ringing Steve Reich-ian patterns and shapes create, appropriately, a feeling of fluttering, flying, before being shaken by a levy-breaking, stadium rock battery. Its narrator expressing his desire to be consumed at the heart of passion’s flame, in a search to find, to know, true love.

I Hear A New World is a grainy, densely layered, filtered fog of ethereal emissions. An “ambient” of buzzing resonance, serene static and interference. A heavenly, harmonic hum akin to Brock Van Wey’s landmark, White Clouds Drift On And On.

Next Morning Version sends what could be an orchestral snippet spiraling, surrounded by crashing snares. Balancing the pretty with the cathartic, and recalling Black Dog / Plaid’s emotive pioneering early `90s work. The kick initially off-kilter, eventually flattening out to a uniform 4 / 4. Coyote adding cavernous echo as the track travels toward its climax.

I`m sure that I don’t need to mention that everything is anchored by the pair’s reggae-based penchant for a big, big bottom end.

Copy by Dr Rob @banbantonton