Ordinary Rebel of Rotterdam is not the kind of musician who can go about it like a technician striving after perfection. Instead he approaches the treatment of sound as clay, coarse, physical, flawed, alive. Creating his new single Don t Look Away almost entirely without a computer, he looks back to the warmth of vinyl and the grit of cassette tapes all whilst pulling forward digital textures that twinkle like streetlights against midnight concrete. It is boom bap with lo-fi pulse running through it, woven through with trip-hop tones.
What is different about Ordinary Rebel is the intentionally applied restraint. The unwillingness to resort to an endless number of software plug-ins or to an immaculate factory-painted finish lends this tune its gravity. The swings are timeless as the samples are crate-digging gone a bit bonkers, ingrained with the traces of those who bred the freed needle first. Just when you get into the groove, AI-generated voices creep in — not of a different language but his own words, ghostly voices in his head.
