With production partner Roly Porter, Jamie Vex’d released a respectable number of sides for the likes of Planet Mu and Subtext, though for the past year or so he has been going solo. Under his own steam he has also been moving away from the DMZ-styled low end rumblers and in to more experimental territory, highlighted by last year’s In System Travel EP and this new work under the name Kuedo. Vex’d lashes on the heavy artillery for “Starfox” and blasts everything in site, with trigger happy lazer infantry following up the rear to clean up anything left in the wake of the monstrous display of heavy hitting might. “Joy Construction” revisits the themes of his remix of Scuba’s “Twitch” to the point where it could be seen as an alternate take on it. The same choral, one-digit melodies slide in to each other while impossible to play bass keys finger themselves effortlessly. “Shutter Light Girl” is a brief carnival themed interlude with a nightmarish, deep space feel to it that provides a breathing point between the compressed layers of bass and beats of the other tracks.
Underneath the squashed wonk of “Glow” creeps a breathless songstress, hanging on a whisper of air, lifting up the mucky beat-drudgery and sending it into orbit. Here, Vex’d’s mutant brand of leftfield dubstep sounds like Schaeffel techno on temazepam, hurrying to catch up with itself but constantly tripping up and falling flat on its face. As ever the sound wrought by Jamie Vex’d is fastidiously hewn, with each of these complex emissions possessing an unbridled attention to detail. That said, with its slow motion, mutant funk, he infuses “Glow: with an apparent, apathetic air, kind of like the stoner kid at school pulling straight A’s without any effort. Unquestionably the Starfox EP is heavily influenced by rarefied beat makers such as Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke, Debruit and the like, but then the homogeneous nature of this music is such that it constantly evolves through proximal mutations. Kuedo harnesses those freakish strains and uses them to discharge alchemical shock waves that will surely play their own part in the evolution of this music.
