2014 was a great year for Local Action. The London-based imprint has championed sounds from grime’s new wave and beyond, and they’ve capped the year off with the debut from Yamaneko, a London-based producer who’s gathered support from the likes of Mumdance and Logos. Titled Pixel Wave Embrace, the album is the second in a trilogy of sorts, following his Pixel Juice Mix and preceding the forthcoming Pixel Healing Spa. As those titles suggest, Yamaneko’s sound slips into a scene that identifies with music in terms of texture, building imagined environments for their electronic constructions – think PC Music’s supple plastic playground, the metallic brutalist structures of Night Slugs, or Fatima Al Qadiri’s untouchable China. Yamaneko melts his surroundings down across Pixel Wave Embrace, where aquatic imagery surfaces in the most unexpected of places. The LP could easily co-habit the same strange, metaphysical world created by Al Qadiri’s Hip-Hop Spa or Drexciya’s dystopian deep sea, yet its intoxicating mixture of watery imagery and influence in video game soundtracks and classic grime is its own entity entirely. As a result of his fondness for new age and meditational cassettes, this one’s been released on cassette rather than vinyl, and has already sold out of the first two releases. Now, where’s our Walkman?
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