Twelve tracks, one signature: Jhauk carries this debut album alone, with no remixes and no guests, and that gamble says as much about the artist as about the label backing him. The imprint describes it as a record sitting at an intriguing intersection of drum & bass, jazz, fusion and unclassifiable electronica, and the tracklist numbers prove it isn't press-sheet talk: only three of the twelve cuts —'This Time' at 157 BPM, the title track at 163 and 'Dusk Shuffle', also at 163— hit the genre's canonical tempo. The rest breathes between 82 and 122, mid-tempo territory where drum & bass works more as a rhythmic accent than as a container.
The other proper noun is a double one: Blu Mar Ten are Chris Marigold and Michael Tognarelli, a London duo active since 1995 who released on Hospital, Good Looking and Renegade Hardware before rebranding their own imprint as Blu Mar Ten Music in 2012 and opening it up to other artists. That a project this unorthodox lands here —on double vinyl, no less— fits that trajectory: these are producers who have spent three decades stretching the genre's edges, and they know how to spot someone doing the same.
Inside the record, three coordinates to locate the artist:
- 'When Do You Know', a long nine minutes at 97 BPM in B-flat minor, the cut where that jazz patience and fusion streak unfold the furthest.
- 'Passed Us By', the album's only piece in a major key: a luminous breather in a landscape of eleven minors.
- 'Dusk Shuffle', the shortest of the lot and one of the two peaking at 163 BPM: proof that Jhauk can also hit hard when the floor calls for it.
A debut that isn't chasing peak time but the hours after it: late-night music that uses drum & bass as a mother tongue to talk about other things.
Sources: Planet Wax · Wikipedia