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For reasons which I can’t fully wrap my head around, Porter Robinson’s debut full-length Worlds was incredibly well-received by a sizable portion of a few subsets of electronic music fans. Despite some admittedly lukewarm reviews among many well-established music coverage sites, the album hit it big with legions of fans, especially on the humongous media aggregator Reddit (at one point, moderators of /r/electronicmusic, the site’s largest electronic music community, ostensibly considered banning all posts about Robinson due to his omnipresence). Though I feel like I should feel a greater affinity with the man, given the shared surname between him and my pen name, I can’t say that I share these sentiments. “Fellow Feeling” serves as a good example as to why I feel this way. It’s a little bit all over the place, mildly annoying glitchy house breakdown coming in abruptly after an odd vocal sample and burgeoning string arrangement before cutting back out almost immediately at the behest of the string arrangement’s reappearance. The festival-euphoria bent which becomes slowly more apparent as the song blossoms feels off, somehow – I can’t put my finger on why, but the supposed explosion of a 4×4 kick in front of a main-stage instrumental arrangement doesn’t fully capitalize on the four-odd minutes of anticipation and buildup.

Given my apathy towards Worlds, then, it’s especially impressive that Frequent’s bootleg of the song is as phenomenal as it is. Despite the Boulder, CO-based producer’s relative novelty (based on what limited information is available online, it seems as though he’s only been releasing officially for under two years), the song’s sonic construction is nothing short of incredible. Equal parts organically flowing and mechanistic, the song pulsates with a vibrancy not often seen in a mostly-stagnated neuro arena. Its half-time breakbeats pound alongside some of the most brutal clipping and insane distortion patterns since Hybris’ “Garbage Truck”, a comparison I don’t make lightly. More than anything, it grabs its atmosphere in a chokehold, a total joy of cinematic surround-sound which flips the frankly uninteresting original into something far more sinister and jagged. Put simply, this bootleg is one of the finest broken-beat songs of the year so far, and I’d be surprised if this doesn’t lead to far bigger arenas for Frequent.





Brostep
03.10.15
song blew me away, if it wasn't clear from the post. first time I've felt this way about a tune in a looooooong while

klap
03.10.15
sick

klap
03.10.15
delivered the proper wubz that i've been hankering for

theacademy
03.10.15
im confused by the first sentence but dig the track

Brostep
03.10.15
Tbh I played with the phrasing of that one for about 20 minutes and eventually just gave up

hogan900
03.11.15
Worlds wasn't too bad, I actually have a review draft for it. Will give this a listen though.

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