Golden Donna‘s Seedy Approach EP is out today on Atlanta’s excellent electronic label CGI Records. Producer Joel Shanahan delivers the gritty electronic goods on these two A-side cuts, “Smirk” and “Strap“. Pockets of humid sewer gas stream from the former’s subterranean quarters, as machine clang echoes from far below. After this initial stretch falls silent, smokey drum patterning returns with random syncopation making for sooty and oddly swarming beat clusters. By the track’s midpoint, “Smirk”‘s sublimated kick drum really surfaces, as techno rhythms seem to leak from behind brick walls.
“Strap” lightens things up a bit with chords that radiate like blinking neon, as the sound of a lone stenographer types thru the night. Shanahan keeps his approach minimal on the cut, and exchanges “Smirk”‘s foggier feel for a few stripped down beat elements from techno’s monochromatic palette. By the time Golden Donna drops his bit-crushed and reverbed hand claps, “Strap” has taken on a sort of robotic funk–while malfunctioning sonics whistle and whiz by above.
