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An Announcement to Answer
Quantic’s 2006 album continued the gradual expansion of his sonic universe, mixing near-drum & bass and broken beat along with Afro-beat influences into his hip hop/jazz/funk/beatz rhythmic gumbo, and with plenty of Latin flavours from Puerto Rican trumpeters Major and Javier Marrero and vocalist Tempo who sings in Spanish. It makes for a dense and multi-layered club-adjacent album, full of rhythmic inbreeding and quality live instrumentation but also rich with perfectly programmed beats that confidently wander across traditional genre definitions. From the tranquillity of opener Absence Heard, Presence Felt, a tune that cleverly seems to have descended from several global music traditions at once, to the more frantic beat-heavy moments like the no-nonsense jazz-hop of the Ohmega Watts-featuring Blow Your Horn or aptly named Bomb In A Trumpet Factory, An Announcement… delivers nine strong tracks with no filler - it’s a confident, fresh and extremely funky album.