Sporting Life

55 5’s

Comprised of 10 tracks of mind-bending beats, twisted up samples and fuzztone chords, taking influence from the likes of Arca, Actress, DJ Rashad and Aphex Twin 55 5’s is a natural addition to R&S’s tradition of forward thinking electronic experimentation.

Busting out of the traditional long player format, 55 5’s fits more snuggly into the beat tape  / sampladelic tradition that has long proven a fertile font of creativity. From the slurping, spiralling filter-funk of ‘Looks Good On You’  to the frenetic 808 drum n bass of ‘Badd’, the dayglo bounce of ‘Pre-Order The Dope’ to the airy, crystaline ‘We Three’ – 55 5’s is spontaneous and loose, filled with sketched out constructions that vibrate with promise and originality.

Despite having produced two albums for Ratking, it’s still Adiele’s feeling that he’s just begun. “When you sense your production techniques and approaches improving it always feels like you’re just starting out, like the feeling before a game.”

 

“Fan-made YouTube basketball highlight videos were a big inspiration for the project as a whole,” Eric explains. “I was trying to make tracks that you could put images of athletes playing sports to, because when I watch sports set to certain music it gives me chills sometimes, or might bring a tear to my eye because of the emotion the players might be showing at the same time some ill track is playing.”

A large part of hip hop and electronic music’s storied history has been driven by technology, in Sport’s case, to make 55 5’s he utilizes the Roland SP-555, primary weapon of choice of the likes of Panda Bear and MF Doom, which is instrumental to his creative process: “It’s the main instrument that I used in Ratking. It’s so easy to use and has really dope effects to process samples. Our album ‘So It Goes’ was made from loading samples into it, applying the onboard effects then resampling the outputs until you could hear the essence of what the sample was but the 555’s effects turned it into a cool “distant cousin” of the original.” He adds, “Our practice space got burgled right before we went on tour to Australia and my original SP-555 with the SD card with all the samples got jacked, so naming this album after the drum machine that helped me so much seemed like the right thing to do.”

Making his mark as a solo artist with this release, it’s clear that Sport’s compositions easily stand alone with no vocal assistance, although some future collaborations are planned for his album due on R&S next year.

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