JASSS - Weightless
(iDEAL)
Finally available, the hugely tipped debut LP from JASSS is a marvel to behold: music to believe in, to be inspired by. Spanish born Silvia Jiminez Alvarez (aka JASSS) has no formal musical training per se and has only been DJing for the last two years (releasing three dancefloor-stirring singles) but Weightless proves undeniably that hers is a fresh and daring new talent whose interests span styles, eras and continents. On Weightless, the club by-and-large takes a back seat to the artist's creative vision and avant-garde sound design, resulting in a rugged but measured melding of industrial dub, African rhythms, dark jazz inspirations and concrete electronics.
JASSS' music is very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists, such as Diseño Corbusier, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, and she firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite, and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing industrial musics’ angry-guy glare in favor of far more feminine and Latinate pressure systems. It's extremely rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as Weightless, making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures.
Very, very highly recommended if you're into the more abstracted and experimental end of electronic / dancefloor excursions and / or such luminaries Throbbing Gristle (a comparison I do not make lightly), Christoph De Babalon, and the most recent adventures of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. Weightless will turn your head and your body. (Lee)
Check out a track here.