Mozaik

Zomby’s Dedication is not your garden variety dub-step. It’s not the sound that’s peppered into the latest Britney Spears album, nor a Katy Perry remix. Yet, it is not a carbon copy of Burial, and it’s not wobbly or dirty like an album by Distance. What we have here ladies and gentleman is stripped down dub. While the overtones on the album are somewhat melancholic, and hey, that’s kind of what the pioneers of the genre were going for, after slowing down U.K. styles of Two-Step and Garage (not your father’s garage rock), they’re not enough to be outright depressing.

Zomby as a producer has extracted from many electronic music styles—synthy 80’s sounds, electro, video game soundtracks, and ambient music. Prior to Dedication, he had released a number of EPs in which one could say served as sketches for his experiments. If you visit his Myspace page, for instance, the varied songs you will hear are pretty different from his current output. That is exactly what lured me into Zomby—seeing that he has roots in mixing classic raver kid club cuts, all the way to synthy gems that signaled to me that Zomby was interested more in craft and not trend; beyond someone trying to make a name for himself in the latest hip subgenre in techno, which by the way, has been around for nearly a decade.
Since Dedication isn’t as wobbly or grimey as other albums within the genre, it might seem subcategorized as comfy ambient music. However, it’s too jittery and restless and rhythmic to work. Yet it’s not quite the album one might buy if one is a hardcore dubstep fan. This is precisely the quality I like about Zomby—not tightly fixated to the expected parameters of the genre, bringing instead crunchy beat experiments with ethereal sound-washes, the kind made by a studio loner stringing together little oddities. It’s definitely headphone music—so many nuances that you want to be able to hear every last snippet.

I believe that the songs on Dedication build up to a moment of dark euphoria, as oxymoronic as that may seem. He alternates between average length songs and some which are under a minute long. It’s definitely a journey, with the denouement being “Mozaik”, the sixteenth and final song. While this appears on other blogs as the single, it makes the most sense after hearing the fifteen tracks before it. Enjoy and shake your booty a little!

Take a listen:



Get your copy of Zomby Dedication here.