[New Kanada]

I’ve begun to rely on Adam Marshall — and, to a lesser extent, New Kanada itself — for unconventional house and techno. Given that they’re usually functional, Marshall’s tracks could hardly be called experimental, and yet they often hit fresh combinations anyway. NK33 doesn’t buck the trend, offering five slightly off-center cuts. The first, “Bass Tracking” is a four-minute sketch which may indeed find you “tracking” the low end. Rather than simply swinging back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch, Marshall’s malleable bass ducks and weaves all over, but still drags the focus along with it. And that’s pretty much it, excepting some soft vocal stabs, and ringing drums that sound like a sewer cover spiraling to a halt.

Broadly speaking, “Holding Down” could be called tech house, but as you’d expect from an artist of Marshall’s standing, it side-steps all the negative connotations accompanying the tag nowadays. Loping coolly along, it sounds like the type of big-room thing Daniel Stefanik might make. The drums and hats are all relatively muzzled, with Marshall favoring an easier brand of rhythm. The melody is fairly non-committal too; a series of tightly plucked, fluttering notes that fly low and fast. In the “Beatless” version, they’re isolated alongside some of the lighter percs. “Kazan” kind of splits the difference between these first two tracks, taking the tech house foundation of “Holding Down” and adding the juking feel of “Bass Tracking.”

Christian “XI” Andersen’s remix of “Ferns” might be the most interesting thing here. Again it’s a short doodle, this time with a dubstep slant. To me, dubstep has always implied a focus on bass, but in this instance there’s an almost cloying amount of mid and high frequencies. Rather than being treated with the now-platitudinous Burial effect, the female vocals have been chopped into glitchy patches and are well matched with stammering percs. What’s appealing about Marshall’s records is not just that they continually surprise, but that they do so without sacrificing quality. Whereas most artists spend months or years honing particular signatures, Marshall seems to move between many with ease.