Kiji Suedo’s full-length offering, Riot, out this Friday via Edinburgh’s Hobbes Music, finds the Osaka-based producer locating the sound that he’s been searching for. In his own words, something with “A completely unique texture.” Clearly rooted in a history of rigid 4 / 4s, Kiji’s music here takes those influences and tropes somewhere a little different. Try to imagine Detroit beatdown fed through dub techno’s filters, or if The Indelible MCs / Company Flow had turned their hand to house. Drums thud, funky, loose, and kinda outta sync. Their bumpy, broken groove a bit like a hypnotic Theo Parrish production, though more a muted crashing and colliding. An offbeat, but powerful pulse. Bulbous bass-lines emit a Basic Channel-esque boom, and teasing acid twists. Buried in the mix are fragments, suggestions, of familiar classics, but these details, snippets, are submerged, blurred, smudged into a warm, fuzzy, fog. Manoeuvring the murky depths, vocals are pitched-shifted, sleazy, subliminal. Syncopated swings are serrated. Snares are stuttered. Eq`d almost out of existence, Relief Records` raw Chicago jack is reduced a shuffling ghost by Kiji’s machines. Forget Funkadelic`s Cosmic Slop, this is a “cosmic sludge”, an amorphous, evolving, organic ooze. A dose of deep listening for the discerning, leftfield, dance-floor. 

Kiji Suedo’s Riot is released this Friday, on Hobbes Music.