A mysterious new addition to Upon You's roster -- or is it a regular contributor's alias? who knows! -- here comes Hypoxia and his debut iteration for us, "Recommended Reading". Comprised of four groove-enslaving tracks bound to make some serious impact on the dance floor, this maiden flight fuses the techno and house DNAs in exquisitely fresh, no-frills fashion. Starting off with the playfully effervescing "Brief Candles", a relatively minimalist churner cross-pollinating hints of freeze-dried Detroit house with hi-NRG garage tropes through one helluva pulsating treat. Choppy and wavy to the fullest, "The Old Man and the Sea" reels off inch-perfectly sequenced onslaughts of passive-aggressive bass and a skittish drum chug on a post-trancey tip, tailored to bring any crowd to a steady simmer thru and thru.
Dwelling the darker EBM and wave-friendly fringes of Hypoxia's versatile headspace, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" merges warehouse-sized machine thunder with more suavely intimate shuffling house rhythms to form its own shadow-clad narrative. Sexed-up robot romance from a not-so-distant dystopian future, flush with rapturous climaxes and a healthy dose of menacing jack to top it all off in the most coercively exhilarating manner. Final number the first stretch of "Moon Tiger" trades the slacker nature of the previous grooves for a more in-your-face type of gridlocked techno, but rapidly veers off into more poetic and electronica-laced territories. Grinding heavily altered UK vox samples with slo-moving pads and shape-shifting circuit spurts, it's a hybrid half-pumping/half-serene finale that beams us up straight into the zone.
