groove 13 by Skip Club Orchestra

Three years after the last groove series was released, the time has come for its next instalment. The idea behind the latest series is variations around footwork, ambient and 160 bpm tempo. The series kicks off with Skip Club Orchestra, who, alongside DJ Fulltono and CRZKNY, started the outlines catalogue. This Japanese artist is an extremely important figure for outlines - along with the aforementioned Japanese producers, he forms the sonically and conceptually specific foundation for the musical explorations of the label's owner, Pawel Dunajko. Tatsuya Sasaki, together with DJ Fulltono and CRZKNY, initiated a completely new sound, which can be described as footwork minimalism.

On groove 13, the Skip Club Orchestra offers two almost twenty-minute tracks arranged around a few basic elements: piano sounds, clicks and cuts aesthetics, field recording and ambient. groove 13.1 launches its subtle machinery abruptly, and the listener hears from the first sounds that he has entered a world built on delightful and delicate loops. The whole machinery of sound seems to be an extremely fragile structure that could collapse under a more rapid blast of bass, meanwhile it floats on its internal jitter.

groove 13.2 has a very similar structure and sonic palette to the track on side A of the cassette. This time, however, the listener is placed in a different environment and a different constellation of delight. Looped piano sounds move around subtle wisps of field recordings suggestive of an urban landscape. In contrast, at the heart of the track Skip Club Orchestra has located a vibrant pulse of a beat that shifts unexpectedly towards footwork dynamics from time to time, in several places, via changes in lighting and accents.

Released in 2017, Skip Club Orchestra's groove 3 was a kind of manifesto for the Japanese footwork sound and what direction the outlines label could take. With his latest release, Tatsuya Sasaki shows the potential he still has and once again paves the way for Outlines with his extraordinary music.

outlines is a searching label. It starts with Chicago Footwork and aims at new forms, outlines and intuitions.

guides, is the more frivolous branch of outlines, where releases are characterised by greater freedom of form.

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