Leo Dissipating Heavily

Mutant club flexes from Youth & $hotta Tapes’ alum Leo on a new LP rendering traces of UKG, dembow and brukbeats with weightless sound designer physics inna deadly style.

A certain bygone spirit of early ‘00s electronic and UK dance music guide Leo to mess with club mechanisms in expressively curious ways on ‘Dissipating Heavily.’ The tightly sculpted eight track album chases two volumes of the self-released ‘lived’ tapes with the corkscrewing results of concerted studio sessions spent eking his own sound from a Manchester air thick with ghosts of dance music’s past.

Wafting in with the melancholic sway and Pev style dubstep lean of ‘Worth’, the album buckles and tears between the peg-leg stumble of his knotty drums on ‘Banal’ to a bit of Bristol-styled dubstep tension in ‘Dramaed’, and down a trapdoor of noisier inspiration with ‘Embarrassment of Riches’. At its core, ‘Funicular’ stars out for levels of stick ’n move brukstep parry comparable to prime Demdike Stare, and ‘Courts’ zip-ties a dembow rhythm with shearing sound design to darkside effect also explored in the sidewinding momentum of ‘Jade Floors’, before ‘Passion Assets’ vents the tension upwards and outwards.