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Systematic currently have their fingers in many delicious pies. Fillings in the flavour of the awesome Spirit Catcher (check their album Partners in Crime), Gorge’s Freaky Flies, Stephan Bodzin and Marc Romboy’s Triton and a bunch of others. You have to give Systematic credit for allowing their artists to develop and seemingly have a good vision of what will be commercially successful without offending their quality sensibilities.
Dusty Kid’s last outing on Systematic was 2008’s Sawless/Sineless in conjunction with long-term collaborator Emmanuele Marascia. Listening back you can hear the development in sound from a raw techno with maybe an overtone of progressive to a solid, straight-up house offering. Whether Fairlight refers to the use of the vintage sampler of the same name I couldn’t tell but I’m fairly sure there’s some good old-fashioned analogue gear serving up the nice phat sound. Many-layered percussion builds over a high string and powerful kick drum leading to a cut-up vocal and wide bass sound. The arrangement weaves in out of the percussion and bass groove highlighting different elements opening out to the full vocal sample - a kind of tribal chant. An interesting departure from Dusty Kid’s usual sound and good solid club-fodder it is too, it has the funk that’s for sure.
Marascia keeps it faithful to her clean techno sound with a bass-led, 909 tools variation that rips it up towards the end of the track when all the elements come together nicely to give a techno wall-of-sound that will give you a buzz cut straight out the speaker stack. Not as interesting as some of the recent Systematic releases but it’s good to hear Dusty Kid getting back to basics and I will say the original is beautifully crafted and sonically very good indeed. Worth checking out.