JASSS - Weightless (2017)

Much anticipated and tipped debut LP from JASSS; a measured, rugged blend of industrial dub, African and dark jazz inspirations that comes highly recommended if you’re into more abstracted and experimental electronic/dancefloor excursions or the work of Christoph De Babalon, Toresch, Mecanica Popular, Throbbing Gristle etc.

Jasss makes her head and body-turning album debut with Weightless, an absorbingly stark and spiky set of productions following a trio of acclaimed 12”s for Berlin’s Mannequin and Amir Alexander’s Annunaki Cartel since 2016. Her full length debut has allowed Jasss room to consolidate and expand her grizzled dancefloor structures to a full length episode that brutally dovetails with Joachim Nordwall and co’s unforgiving but compelling take on contemporary noise and industrial musics.

Very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists such as Diseño Corbusier, Xeerox / Krishna Goineau, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, Jasss 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 music’s angry guy glare in favour of far more feminine and latinate pressure systems.

She does so with an aching patience in the opener, Every Single Fish In The Pond, escalating from a lone cymbal motif and location recordings to a pulsating darkroom boldness by the end of an incendiary scene-setter, before really getting her fangs in with the clenched but driving EBM torque of Oral Couture, recalling a spiked Toresch or CTI hovering at the darkroom’s entrance.

From here on in a dream sequence of events take place, morphing from febrile, hash-induced triplet pirouettes in Danza thru the martial free jazz/industrial cut-up of Cotton For Lunch, to a definitive apex of sprung, stepping cybergoth in Weightless, with a pause for Alberich-like reflection on Theo Goes Away, before the voodoo rises once again with the druggy swagger of Instantaneous Transmission of Information, and her stoic, blunt-edged mauler, To Eat With Dirty Hands.

It’s 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.