[Naked Lunch]

The first release by Sherard Ingram for [NakedLunch] continues the Irish label’s campaign for emotional nightside electronics, merging the teary fog of Autonomic productions with pulsing Detroit futurism. Both tracks are stealthy high-BPM electro, and in someone else’s hands they might have ended up too edgy, pumping, and masculine. Luckily, Ingram strikes a vital balance between rhythmic power and searching moodiness, with the release serving as an excellent counterpoint to new waves of activity from Urban Tribe.

Percussively, “Sphere of Influence” maintains a slightly rickety funk, sort of a loose jit-not-jit. An acidic bassline is filtered up and down and tweaked under plush, ethereal pads, occasionally flickering to the fore in a frenzy. “Sentiment,” is sparser, melding a booming bass drum with hi-hat sputter. A druggy vocal echoes “I love you…do you love me too?” out into the darkness and one of those rumbling, tight-and-squelchy Drexciyan bass lines emerges alongside light melodic tinges. The elements at play are fairly minimal, but Sphere of Influence/Sentiment encapsulates why people incessantly repeat “Detroit” like a mantra. There’s an aura at once exuberant and dystopian here, a personal element that pushes these compositions beyond basic repetition for dance floors and into car stereos on long, yearning nightdrives.