Ratcliffe: "Tightrope"

Simon Ratcliffe is no malingerer. Not only has he been playing with “Battles-inspired time signatures, DJing reggae seven-inches and David Lynch mixes,” he’s also spent at least seventeen years being 50% of Basement Jaxx—the UK’s only house act to take animatronic gibbons beyond novelty value. Having recently decided to go solo again for only the second time since 1995, Ratcliffe’s new EP, Dorus Rijkers, is like a booby trap for anyone expecting dance-pop. Instead it overshadows the Jaxx’s trademark zaniness by gathering electro loops that kick heavy as a cow, and cutting them together in a way to imply the producer’s just speed-completed Street Fighter. And if the music alone wasn’t colorful enough, the EP’s theme follows a famous Dutch lifeguard, one who rescued 487 people and smoked a pipe with the King of the Netherlands.

Bursting to life through a cyclone of ripped bass, “Tightrope” is how ol’ Dorus must’ve felt while negotiating a particularly vicious maelstrom. The sheer haphazardness of this track will be gold dust to commissioners of Japanese toy commercials, and the way it fizzes in no real direction is like someone launching fireworks in March. But the constant twists, jingling, and meltdown have an energy that hooks your sense of adventure, irrespective of whether you’re seasoned enough to survive for four minutes in a spring tide. Some kind of melody might have been nice to make everything a touch more digestible, though. In places “Tightrope” gets so awkward and disjointed it could well be an episode of Campus. Strange, then, that it sounds so similar to cranked-up credits from The IT Crowd.