Music for Existing

Martyn Deykers has always been restless, or at least his beats have — schooled in drum’n’bass, then elaborating on first-wave UK dubstep and its path towards (re-)hybridizing with house, techno, and garage. By the time 2018’s post-heart attack Voids signaled a startling culmination of all that, it seemed like he was beyond embodying any style in particular — post-dubstep is still the closest thing that fits — and from there on out, for a good eight years or so, that was that, give or take an EP. With that in mind, think of the audacity of Music for Existing emerging after all this time, and it being the album to make people realize Martyn’s continued potential. It’s as if all his stylistic traits that coalesced on Voids — the cavernous dynamics of reverbed snares and hi-hats, the glowing, unexpectedly warm core of dark synth chords, the anxious negative space you can feel when the sub-bass recedes — can now be channeled through entirely different tools. Music for Existing reconnects with the analogue, in part as a defiant stab against the idea that AI could create something out of nothing, and also as a way of using potentially-divisive, “inorganic” tech to reemphasize that it can still be in the service of an entirely human process. In this case, the music is built with the aid of good-old-fashioned sampling, and the fact that the samples are all based around instrumentation supplied by collaborators puts the lie to the idea that electronic music can’t be a truly organic collective effort. In some ways, Music for Existing is an acknowledgement of the late ‘90s post-trip-hop/acid jazz wave that crossed into d’n’b — think Photek’s noir-jazz Modus Operandi or LTJ Bukem’s fusiony Journey Inwards on one side, and the early ‘00s downtempo/nu jazz Ninja Tunesmithing of Cinematic Orchestra and Amon Tobin. And it sounds “played” rather than “built” — an all-human synthesis of something a band could reproduce in person. But Martyn’s also a contemporary of Madlib and Adrian Younge and the Brainfeeder massive, the artists who accompanied the new jazz revival, and recognizes the ways that all these strains of beat music converge back into an ancestral improvisational predecessor that make “then” and “now” moot points. The convergence of thunderous congas, torrential hi-hats, bass+piano low-end, and a single faded trumpet on “Heavy Sound” conveys the tense beauty of an encroaching lightning storm. The track-hopping freeform d’n’(stand-up)b of “Hypnotoxic Laser” puts the machine-gun kicks of the genre through a fluttering room-of-mirrors refraction. And the late-album two-fer of “Whiplashed” (an Afro-jazz rumble led by Mark Cisneros on sax) and “When the Sleeper Wakes” (a verdant spiritual soul-jazz excursion a’la Lonnie Liston Smith) point towards a whole new route.