Enabl.ed: Dips33 EP
Concrete Plastic

Enabl.ed (aka twenty-six-year-old New Yorker Jimmy Batista) could well be the best opening act Autechre never had. On his six-track debut EP Dips33, Batista, who also operates under the iameb 57 name, serves up detail-packed electronica salvos whose chrome-plated melodies and splatter-funk beats often come across like early Autechre tracks collapsed into three-minute miniatures (Batista's propensity for titles like “Orcyn4” tightens the connection). “Sibevick” gets things moving with a fireball of mashed beat crunch and throb peppered with chiming, 8-bit synthesizer melodies. Elsewhere, willowy synth tones stretch themselves into elegiac arcs atop a bed of neo-funk convulsions (“Maxille”), seizure-gripped percussive blasts strafe the synthetic terrain (“Dips33”), and sputtering funk pulses augment rapid-fire smatterings of glitchy whirr-and-click (“Lalik”). One could simply proceed directly to the last track, “Prehts,” for as good a representation as any of the Enabl.ed approach as its less frenetic character allows the listener to more easily take the scenery in.

November 2010