- Sticking to the Punch Drunk's ethos of pushing brand new sounds emanating from Bristol, the focus for its 11th vinyl single is squarely on Guido, a producer hailing from Joker's purple-clothed camp of South Western synthesizer dexterity.
Guido's approach is different, however, from the aforementioned Joker and recent Punch Drunk signing Gemmy. Sure, he's using the same Dr. Dre inspired G-funk leads, but the "Way You Make Me Feel" feels like its rolling around at about 95 BPM, a far cry from dubstep's standard 140 BPM.
Before you get to that, though, we have "Orchestral Lab," which rolls on stripped-to-the-bone percussion. In the same way that Shackleton layers drum tracks over each one another to create that essential drive, Guido piles on Moog textures as if his life depended on it, utilising MIDI strings, horns, pianos and an array of incessant melodies. Constantly evolving through instruments and melodies, he shows not only a sure hand for creating hooks, but a desire to ply as many of them into three-and-a-half minutes as possible.
But back to "Way You Make Me Feel": Sounding somewhere between an '80s action film love scene and a square bass-driven Hudson [Mohawke] Heater, "Way" drops saxophone melodies and double time hi-hats. The sexualisation of the brass section definitely gives the track a passionate-on-screen-love-making-montage kind of vibe that evokes teenage memories of averting your eyes from those awkward moments in films when your parents are sitting right next to you in the theatre. It's on this track that Guido's production really shines; he manages to inject his incessant middle 16 bars of pure bass pressure with an air of understated elegance as he twists the delicate texture of grand pianos around the 80Hz onslaught.
Tracklist A Orchestral Lab
B Way You Make Me Feel