Inkjet / Fluo

Hessle Audio is Ben UFO, Pearson Sound, and Pangaea’s label — described consistently as the most intellectually serious UK bass-music imprint of the 2010s. Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 album Workaround (for PAN) explicitly applied West African polyrhythm logic to club music: multiple rhythmic cycles running simultaneously, none of them the primary grid. Charnas’s argument about Dilla Time is that it broke through the European 4/4 frame and reunited dance music with non-European rhythmic thinking. Dillon’s work makes the same argument by different means, and from a different direction.

The Inkjet / Fluo 12” with Call Super is from 2017, before the Workaround LP made the polyrhythm argument explicit — but the sensibility is the same. This is UK bass music that treats rhythm as the primary compositional variable rather than as the chassis everything else is mounted on. The Reynolds critique applies in reverse here: rather than “intelligent” being a retreat from the posthuman-functional, Dillon’s work is the posthuman-functional getting more precise about what non-Western rhythm can do inside a club context.