Sinjin Hawke - First Opus (2017)

Sinjin Hawke aims high with the classical-into-contemporary dance music inventions of First Opus, and it’s fair to say that he hits the mark dead on. Sprung from stems and ideas developed during his time working on Kanye West’s TLOP - in particular the haunting Wolves - the results extract from his roots in choral composition and orchestral music to forward an exquisitely chiselled and dazzling take on electronic dance music for 2017.

Intensely detailed and fractious in nature, yet singular in its voice and intent, First Opus defines Sinjin’s sound to a thing of compelling, wide-eyed wonder; one riddled with deftly woven references to footwork, ballroom, grime, dancehall and hip hop yet freed of their conventions and swept up with a sense of polymetric freeness and intricacy usually reserved to the contours of classical forms. It’s basically as delirious as The Dream gone skydiving or any of HudMo’s most head-spinning peakers, but even still there’s a grandness and poise to all 14 tracks which bypasses both those examples on his own trajectory to stellar heights.

Scaling up the vertiginous strings and juking pirouettes of Monolith [Overture], which introduces the soaring vocal ident from Wolves which ties the whole album together, First Opus unfolds as a 3D tableaux of HD, hypermodern dance music; ratcheting the future funk in Dawn Of Intensity and steering it thru sublime choral percolations in They Can’t Leave You, to the lip-bitingly tight discipline of Don’t Lose Yourself To This and nexx-level Arca styles in Railgun.

At the album’s core Flood Gates coolly refreshes any burnt out synapses with a swarm of needlepoint nano-bot rhythms and melancholic strings, before Snow Blind comes on like a mutant Equiknoxx piece, saving some of his most staggering material for the whipsmarts of Onset’s brassy swagger and the buckled Norvern Bassline-meets-US hip hop pressure of Cold Blood and a breathless rush of autotuned gospel glory in Divination and the climactic finale, In Loving Memory.