Point G: #9

You feel the obligation sometimes to step back from the superlatives of hyping up tracks and artists and try to warn people when something really amazing is going on. DJ Gregory, alias Point G, was never an unheralded voice but his productions now are on such a high level that people need to sit up and pay strict attention.

This collection of tracks on #9 sounds like a set of DJ tools that just couldn’t stay in the box – glacial blooms that stretched toward the sunlight until they became something more, something beautiful and terrifyingly intense. These five mental cuts open and close a circle, a self-contained ecosystem in which many varieties of tracks seem more familiar to one another than to anything else out there. I’m maybe going about this wrong: listen, instead, to “Try to Fight” – a full-throttle track that sounds like Chicago House as traditional as you can make it. Slowly, though, the Gregory touch becomes apparent. Is that an Indian harmonium? Finger cymbals? How does the entire track stop with the pluck of a single string and start up again like a precision-tooled music machine? They’re not all like this but most of them are, and the gaps in between are lurid with sounds and influences that Gregory and about four other people on earth are able to incorporate into dance music without it sounding silly, pretentious or deliberately off-beat.