SpeakerHumper

SpeakerHumper

Hatiras, JELO [Hatrax Records]

24 May, 2008 | 7.12PM

• Written by: The Last Real DJ Alive
• Filed under: Music Recommendations: hatiras, hatrax, speakerhumper

You can see why some people don’t get house music, something epitomised by this brilliant and fresh Hatiras production.

Compare this kind of material to The Beatles and you couldn’t have a greater contrast - one is full of dense, harmonious layers and the other is a sparse, pumping slice of bass and syncopated stabs - but both styles bear similarities in that they’re creatively adventurous and aurally exciting.

Anyone who dismisses this record is a close-minded fool.

‘SpeakerHumper’ is a rather interesting name, considering that on Beatport’s previous review of Hatiras’ ‘Bass Monkeys’ we mentioned something or other about a monkey making ugly love to a CDJ-1000.

Perhaps Hatiras was reading?

The name is apt - the bass is so pumping and deep that it makes you incapable of imagining anything else other than grabbing hold of a speaker stack and showing it how much you love house.

The arrangement is sparse so to accentuate the hugeness of the low frequencies inside.

They will take you back to an embryonic state of being in the womb, so deep they plunge.

Keeping the bass and beats nicely central, Hatiras and JELO get to work on making their track exciting by injecting weird, subliminal melodies into the limits of the stereo field that work on so many levels.

These aren’t your bread-and-butter Beatles melodies, we’re talking about innocuous but strangely compelling sets of resonant pulses occurring on the 16ths, whose pitches and cutoffs dip and fall.

Everything is satisfyingly dynamic, peaking and “troughing” without you even realising, keeping you moving.

Hatiras and JELO are masters of arrangement.

The only other hugely distinguishable elements inside ‘SpeakerHumper’ are what sound like a sample from the retro Defender video game and a female vocal.

The Defender one is brilliant, again, rising and falling through various filter and sampling techniques.

It’s the sound that plays when you thrust your rocket in the Williams Defender game.

The female vocal doesn’t come in much, but when it does, it’s just before major track transitions.

And it’s processed wonderfully, sounding rich and full to the ear, adding an excellent, organic contrast to the digital components of ‘SpeakerHumper’.

All together now ... ‘FUNKY!’

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