Thug Entrancer follows up his outstanding 2014 LP Death After Life (Software) with this intriguing new EP offering, Wage Mage/Entropy. Created in conjunction with Denver’s Meep Records, a company that specializes in making handmade lathe cut “albums”, this very limited offering is packaged as both a rectangle shaped and flexi record. “Wage Mage” “I” and “II”” appear on the rectangle portion of this 4-song release, while “Entropy I w/ Killd By” and “Entropy II” are on the flexi.
Both “Wage Mage” “I” and “II” bubble out of protean techno beginnings; but “I” boils over into a vintage acid house workout, while “II”‘s skewed groove offers more of a delayed gratification-only to finally work itself into a simmer by midpoint, before cooling back out into a single beating bass drum by the end. If “Wage Mage” “I” and II” conjure more of a vintage vibe, suggesting Chicago’s famed acid house days, “Entropy I w/ Killd By” blasts off into the “now” with a kinetic helping of hyper-speed footwork–the Windy City’s sonic flavor du jour. Though, as the name suggests, this cut seems grafted onto another, with both genetically encoded for their own demise. By the time we reach “Entropy II”, we’ve lost most any reference to current or past trends in electronic music, as Thug Entrancer’s Ryan McRyhew opts instead for an abstract unmooring of sound and rhythm completely in keeping with the track’s title.
