Anachronistic

Tek 9 is Dego from 4Hero — originally his solo guise for rave and jungle, in the late ’90s it took a turn to downtempo / trip hop beats. Sonar Circle is Dominic “Domu” Stanton, a mainstay of 4Hero’s Reinforced label and the London broken beat scene. Stuck in their respective homes during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, while others made introspective “lockdown ambient” they went the other way and revisited their rave roots with some hyperspeed excursions. But there’s nothing retro about this — though “Anachronistic” is often wrongly used to mean old-fashioned, the word really means “out of time.” This is rave music for the age of Sherelle, not for the ’90s: it uses jungle’s complex breakbeats as its starting point but uses the crispest digital production and brings in Chicagoan footworking, zippy techno keeping it living and vivid the whole way through.