Crooked Machine

2021’s Crooked Machine is the sound of UK bleep techno pioneer and producer-extraordinaire Crooked Man going to town on his and Róisín Murphy’s Róisín Machine album of the previous year, reworking the tracks into heavy-duty, dubbed-out club grooves and looped and chopped abstract-disco. 

One of Crooked Man’s many talents is his sense of dance floor dynamics and he makes club moves all over these arrangements, constructing grooves so solid you can get lost in their relentless looping, expertly building and releasing tension, while smothering the tracks in the swirls, bleeps, tweaks and FX of underground house and techno. In keeping with the dub tradition, Murphy’s vocals have been chopped up and slung across the mix smothered in delay and reverb, providing faint, disjointed echos of the original tracks.

Pristine dub-disco, Róisín Machine delivers all the build-ups and breakdowns, the joys of the relentless loop, and all the warped sonic extremism of an underground DJ set. Strong.