Zora Jones - Ten Billion Angels (2020)

Fractal Fantasy co-founder Zora Jones commits a dazzling debut solo album of animated arps, alien melody and razor-trimmed trap patterns with ‘Ten Billion Angels’, leading on from her ‘Vicious Circle’ co-production with Siniin Hawke and Spanish-French trap star La Zowi

The result of four years encased in headphones and staring at a laptop screen while on the road, ‘Ten Billion Angels’ entwines Zora's fascination with CGI tentacle erotica and human emotion in a slippery suite of restless creations. As a visual artist responsible for the label’s hyper upfront artwork, Zora brings a visual aspect to each tune, while human emotion is rendered through her tremble-jawed synthetic vocal cut-ups that hark back to Kanye West’s earliest sped-up soul chops and happy hardcore, malleably tempered into a range of giddy, ravishing flights and also more plaintive downbeat moments.

Everything from grime to orchestral rap, Jersey house, trap and drill and whatever else that sparkles and moves bodies in the modern age gets filleted and spun out into a spectrum of candyfloss thizz and hypeR&B, tilting from airborne pirouettes in ’Shadows To The Light’, thru fluctuating turns of the soul-biting ‘Paranoid’, to the rugged trap gravitas of ’Sisters Blade’, silver grill-flashing club gear in ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’, and Rian Treanor-esque twiss-up in ‘Revenge of the Bitch’, before settling into lusher reggaeton on ‘I Wanna Lose You’, and recalling Björk or Arca in the neon-lit ballad ‘Come Home’.