Vacation Bye Bye

A Various Artists 12” on Closer, the record label run by Berlin-based DJ and producer, Moomin. After a couple of quality 12”s by Moomin the label threw the net wide open inviting house producers to work outside their usual domain. Mr Tophat and Art Alfie take the A side with a wildly processed, loosely stitched sample freak-out that piles on drama through dusty old rips and riffs while keeping everything very distant. On the flip, Wun Two, FloFilz, and Hubert Daviz drop winsome beats enriched with soulful licks from old records.

The split across the two sides: same source material — jazz samples, dusty breaks, vinyl crackle — but the A side drifts into a four-on-the-floor pulse while the B side lands on a boom-bap grid. Nobody here is making a statement about hip-hop meeting house music. They’re just making tracks from the same crates and letting tempo decide which bin the record store files it under. If you know the Box Aus Holz crew’s crossover sensibility, this is the same current. The post-Dilla beat scene trading ideas with deep house producers.