ELECTRONICA
BY STEPHEN WORTHY
Hieroglyphic Being
★★★★★
There Is No Acid In This House
SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP
Unfiltered, unfettered electronic dance music from a modern legend of Chicago House.
“I’m working through my sorrows inside the machines,” Jamal Moss says about the intoxicating, elemental house music he makes as Hieroglyphic Being. As a youth, Moss watched Chicago house pioneer Ron Trent DJ. Today, he’s a link between Trent and his hometown’s thriving contemporary jazz scene (see Makaya McCraven; Joel Ross). Despite an astonishing 50-plus albums in 15 years, Moss’s quality levels are consistently high, his vision unrelenting. On There Is No Acid In This House (spoiler: there’s acid aplenty), beats often simmer in the background – there, but only partly there. On Let Me Know How U Really Feel, they run at warp speed but verge on the imperceptible. Elsewhere, the industrial rhythms (Throbbing Gristle a firm favourite) that wooed teenage Moss are reflected in the scrum of kick drums and breakneck pace of Dark Acidic Organs From The Void. The melancholia lingering over much of Hieroglyphic Being’s robo-funk merely adds to the rich listening experience.