"Beatdown shapeshifter Michael J. Blood opens his 2025 account with lush and rugged turns of club and carpet sprawled groovers, vitally updating the palette with a fluoro synth quintessence that ditches some of the scuzz for a more widescreen, late night experience. The most impactful MJB album yet, especially if Actress, Gescom, Larry Heard or Shinichi Atobe are your thing. As the story goes, Michael J. Blood was introduced to the world by Tom Boogizm on a fateful NTS show back in 2019, which was subsequently cut to vinyl by Finn’s 2 B Real Records in 2020. That record opened the door to a slew of crooked club mutations hailed among this decade’s most cultishly coveted, followed by jams with Rat Heart, Samizdat and Richie Culver, plus a cut for Chanel’s manc jamboree, before shotting four volumes of ‘Archetypal Artefacts’, a banging 12” for DDS, and the recent ‘Joy + Pain’ tape that now feeds forward into this new album, unlocking a whole new level to his sound. ‘Spaces in Between’ is the result of a concerted period of R&D in distinctive, helical tessellations of the NYC, Chi, and 313 DNA that pumps Blood’s veins, and has long pooled in Manchester’s fêted club sound. It’s a subtle but vital update of his palette, from the opening spiral of electrosoul-fuelled arps and pads in ‘AKNEW’ comparable to Gerald Donald as much as the Gescom/Lego Feet axis, into the soaring, proggy technous of ‘XPNDR’, and up to the deep house swag of ‘GO AGAIN’, the tutors of deep Afro-American jazz techno loom as large as north Manc cranks and SoYo soul boys on MJB’s sound here. By turns he has the club/afters/bedroom wrapped around his lil digits in squirming beatdown ace ‘TLG’, or spangled to heady bleeps of ‘IN BI SI X’, whilst really stretching out along cosmic jazz vectors in the weightless, airborne sensuality of ‘GT WHT UUUU GIVE’ and the atsro-planing keyboard meditation ‘Aluminium Rain’, bringing it all back to root in the wall-banging house of ’SPACE BE’, for the heads. "-Boomkat
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