[Offseason]

Swiss producer Anom Vitruv emerged last year with a grainy, self-titled 12″ for Tabernacle Records. Unlike many recent so-called experimental house records, its severely dusted tracks seemed to be coming from a genuinely ascetic, mysterious place — not simply hiding normal, hooky dance music behind some cassette fuzz. The artist’s untitled follow-up for 7″ label Offseason improves on that formula, and furthers his reputation for crookedness. Because it’s a 7″, the four-tracker doesn’t include anything more than three and a half minutes, but no matter — Anom Vitruv packs an abundance of ideas into a small space, and does so with grace. The pervasive smudginess might have something to do with that, as it tends to deform his palette into indistinct shapes.

There’s nothing as dance-floor-oriented as on the Tabernacle EP, however, as the tracks shift between disjointed ambience and bleary, broken, Hype Williams-style pieces. The latter is especially apparent on the third track, where an arrangement of murky monologue and oneiric synth lines comes across like a more refined take on that duo’s sound. For a record made up of quick glimpses, it even manages to maintain some sense of narrative. Its fuzzed-out beginnings of dragtime synth weight, clanging hi-hats, and clips of overdriven acid develop into an almost elegiac finale, as a piano solo is smothered by the same sort of filtered, high-end mist that coated Lee Gamble’s Dutch Tvashar Plumes. This is a surreal little trip of a record that, with a run of only 222 copies, ought not to fly under the radar.