The first tape, cassette, release on Vladimir Ivkovic’s Offen Music features two arty cuts of dub funk. The music is a collaboration between Cédric Marszewski aka Pilooski and Marc Nguyen Tan, who’s perhaps better known as Colder. Bounced back and forth from Paris to Barcelona, some might call the production “Lo-Fi”, but rather it’s pared to an absolute minimum. Super sparse, super stripped, with bass strings, not drums, driving the rhythms. The tracks are slow, dark and muscular. Bottom-end rumble filling all available space. What detail there is comes in the shape of drones and echoed guitar. Frenchman Clement Froissart picks the latter, letting out strange, angular, mutant, Marc Ribot-like rock ’n’ roll licks. Occasionally synths swell and cymbals shimmer The scenes these sounds summons are those of movers and shakers on `80s New York’s Lower East Side. To my ears at least, there are sonic parallels with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michael Holman’s seminal experimental outfit, Gray. Then there’s the poetry…

Craig Louis Higgins Jr. dons his Mutado Pintado alias to lead Inhumanity & Justice, a scorched piece of “beat” that rivals Steve Jesse Bernstein’s Morning In The Sub-Basement Of Hell. Mists of mysterious flute and Middle Eastern six-string figures tangling around talk of “tearing away flesh”, “licking off wounds” and addictions to “the fear, the terror.” Louisahhh Pilot is ringmaster for My Resources. A performer who describes herself as “raw coal thrown at the wall still burning”, here she’s inspired by the work of Audre Lorde, who once described herself as “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet.” Exploring female identity and challenging a culture of oppression, celebrating the erotic, and citing sex as a source of power, an energy for change, Louisahhh’s delivery is part Leslie Winer, and part Chantal’s The Realm. Delay doubles drums, and creates trippy effects. Bass tones bumble and stumble like a drunk tuba. Both tunes are fine funky alternatives fit for glamorous hooligans. The sort of shadowy, very leftfield, trip hop tempo-ed stuff that used to be championed at Leeds’ Sunday Soundclash bash. Both could also have easily slotted into Tolouse Low Trax`s terrific Kiosque Of Arrows.

.300 Whisper’s Inhumanity & Justice is out now on Offen Music.