The Sheffield label Short Span is at the forefront of a curious new trend: dub techno is once more having a moment. However, that does not mean the label’s quickly growing roster is nostalgic for some imagined Golden Age in which things were somehow better, or indeed attention spans longer. Strictly stylistically speaking, Vancouver-based producer Yu Su is somewhat of an outlier in the Short Span camp and further underlines that the label is not content merely to regurgitate formulas established by Basic Channel.
Foundry is Yu Su’s second full-length album and features an impressive and surprising guest cast: Japanese dream/city-pop legends Dip in the Pool, the highly prolific British ambient-folk artist memotone, and even the – recently reactivated – post-rock icons Seefeel contribute to three pieces. Besides the clicks’n’cuts-indebted »Cul de sac« and »Wanli«, as well as a title track that calls to mind Porter Ricks at their most acid-affine, Yu Su accordingly mostly eschews the styles that dominate Short Span’s catalogue.
What Foundry offers instead is a set of tracks that takes its cues from mid-2010s Fifth World fantasies, lush downtempo reveries, or sonic abstractions that take great liberties with conventional compositional structures. This makes it a diverse, though not always coherent, album – a stepping stone in her evolution as a forward-thinking producer.
