Review Summary: Baptism of bass
Have you ever seen a dancefloor explode into a chimera of colors? Can your eyes turn cartwheels through a breakbeat climax? Did anyone think it would be possible for a creature of the internet to birth low frequency melodies so muscular that they crush your ribs and eat you like a boa constrictor of bass? The answer is yes and the time is TURQUOISEDEATH.
Guardian is not so much an album as an erected cathedral of rhythm. Six tracks sprawl its run-time, each a room with its own architecture of sound, and at the center of it all is a gravitational pull that drags you into the vortex like a howling god of beats. It begins deceptively. "Univa Transporter", the ambient opener, whispers instead of roars. Hazy pads drift like vapor across a nocturnal city, sub-bass pulses breathing in the distance. It’s a false calm—without mercy, the second track "Canyon of Secrets" detonates in a rapture of texture. Snares snap and kicks thunder, and the melodies thread through like laser beams at the best birthday party your snotty pre-teen self could ever have dreamed of. This is drum and bass rendered colossal, every measure engineered to hijack the nervous system.
In "Canyon of Secrets" and the following tracks, TURQUOISEDEATH reveals the weaponized precision of his craft. It’s not just rhythm; it’s choreography for the bloodstream and it comes with so much sugar that the buyer must be aware. Synths cascade upward only to collapse into monstrous basslines, copulating the impression of vertigo in motion. No birds fly, but we all fall together. "Guardian Surface" plays with restraint—rolling patterns, glitch textures, and twinkling fragments dissolving into smoke—before turning the dial to overload, a breakbeat assault where the hi-hats chatter like machine language spoken at lightspeed.
And then there is the closer "Close Your Eyes". The title is a joke: if it was a book, you wouldn't even blink. But—thirty minutes. A single track… but really, a migration, a journey through valleys of ambient texture, peaks of blistering percussion, rivers of bass so deep you could dig amphoras up from them if your bones weren't turned to jelly. It morphs and mutated, punishing, tender, always colossal. It is the album swallowing itself, collapsing into infinity.
Guardian is not background music. It is a full-body immersion, an endurance test, a love letter to the outer limits of drum and bass and EDM. TURQUOISEDEATH builds monuments, expunging the sordid legacy of the unwholesome genre landmark Sewersvlt aka Cynthoni and building a new internet of things and rhythms. This is not just an album. The dancefloor is a living organism, and tonight it has teeth. Bring your boots.
