Known for her prolific output exploring the outer reaches of house, techno, ambient music and hip hop, Chicago-based artist Zvrra has released a cumulative masterwork with Array of Light out November on Whited Sepulchre Records. Taking its cues from the ice caves and crystals that adorn the album’s cover, Zvrra’s work on Array of Light refracts as it travels out from the source. Taking many shapes at once, the five tracks that make up Array of Light bend flowing drones and ambient melodies between driving, four-on-the-floor house beats that speak to her Chicago lineage. Interwoven throughout are cavernous percussive fills that sound as if they are speaking from deep within the earth and hi-hat patterns that mark time with cicada-like waves of movement. Array of Light folds in organic sounds and processes them into an eerie simulacrum of themselves – a mood that is held in perfect tension throughout – a nocturnal dance record that sounds like ice shattering underfoot, acid bass lines pulsating wildly from some distant cavern and the sounds of tectonic plates slipping underneath each other at 120 bpm. As a follow up to her widely regarded album Flow State, Array of Light delves deeper into the steady techno pulse and gorgeous overtones of that record. Flow State introduced Zvrra to a wider audience with DJ support from Shifted, Ron Like Hell, Rondell Adams, Umfang, DJ Girl, Slono and more. Influential electronic music writer Joe Muggs selected Flow State for his Best Electronic Music column on Bandcamp Daily stating, “Illinois’s “Haitian techno queen” Zvrra, is, without question, a name to watch. All four tracks here are, roughly, Berlin-style, house-tempo techno in the Ostgut Ton vein: bass-heavy, crackling with textural detail, sensually enveloping. But there’s a very human sense of emotion to this EP that sets it apart from the sometimes detached trippiness of the style.” On Array of Light we hear that same attention to every texture, every crackle, every rise and fall. The result being an album that sounds impossibly good played extremely loud. As the world starts to wake up from year of being inside and alone, there is nothing better than hearing a record that celebrates the potential of once again feeling these crystal clear beats pulsing and buckling the walls of a club we are waiting to get into.
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