Here’s something I shoulda, coulda seen coming, but didn’t. A cool collaboration between dance floor subversives, namely Belfast’s Black Bones and Bradford’s Miles J. Paralysis. Both delivering 2 tracks a piece, 1 uptempo, 1 down, for Miles’ own imprint, Crying Outcast. 

The Bones boys, Aaron Black and Timmy Stewart, get kinda Cut Hands on the opening “Psychic Rain Dance”. A hypnotic ceremony of conga complexity, with African chants cheering on those caught up in the ensuing delirium. Their “Low Voltage Dream” is slower. Boasting a rumbling dub B-line, and driven by a TR-808 tick and boom, its still coloured with crunchy, crashing collisions, and topped by mad, but melodic, Moog-y sequences. 

 

Miles’ missives are shorn from the same sonic cloth. “Twilight” introducing techno bass pulses beneath the percussive pummelling. “Two Up” riding a broken bogle beat. The latter, in particular, sinister subterranean, with ghostly, gated gasps, cinematic synths and a lonely rave whistle, like the sound of a sole cicada lost in the Minotaur’s maze. 

The aesthetic of everything is tribal, but drawn from industrial, running angry, aggressive, augmented loops of heavy, punishing hand percussion to fashion stripped back, dark dance rituals. Attempting to tap into something deep, ancient, primal, and escape, destroy the grip of modern life’s day-to-day crap. 

Black Bones & Miles J. Paralysis’ “Black Cross” can be ordered directly from Crying Outcast.