There’s an old adage floated around by a certain contingent of DJs that advises against playing too many big tunes in a set, or starting out with the highest energy tracks you might have prepared. As the legendary French DJ Laurent Garnier used to say, “most of my job is figuring out what not to play” – come in too hot straight out of the gates, and your crowd will get tired quickly, and every banger in your arsenal, no matter how big, sounds a bit smaller when slotted between two other tracks of equal energy – or so the saying goes.
HAAi, for what it’s worth, has seemingly never been interested in this unspoken rule. Her DJ sets, as with her production, tend to be peak-time from the get-go; few of her previous releases could be characterized as below banger levels. I once saw the globe-trotting, London-via-Australia DJ play in a small regional club here in the UK after having just flown direct from a huge multi-day warehouse rave in Russia; the set was so intense it felt as if we were all being physically transported back to that Soviet-era airhanger in Moscow, whether we liked it or not.
On that note, it was always going to be interesting to see how HAAi’s unsurpassed energy could transition to music for a full-length project, which would necessitate greater variety of production. On ‘Baby We’re Ascending’, her debut album on Mute, not that much has changed – with tracks literally entitled ‘Louder Always Better’ and ‘Biggest Mood Ever’, the album does what it says on the tin. Sonically (and with roots in the Australian psychedelic scene), HAAi has always been a lover of distortion and dense low end; the album is loud and heavy throughout, although the sheer density of many of the tracks, particularly in the high frequencies, can often prove exhausting.
In fairness, other parts of ‘Baby We’re Ascending’ are far lusher than in previous work, with vocal contributions from Obi Frankly, gorgeous string arrangements from Quinta and songs like ‘Biggest Mood Ever’ that verge a bit on Robyn’s iconic techno-pop. Overall, the album’s weirder and more ambitious moments tend to be the most enjoyable, like the wonky vocals and left-field turns on the first half of ‘Purple Jelly Disco’, or the interludes ‘AM’ and ‘Louder Always Better’, which mix smashed up jungle with sampled radio bits and a contribution from beloved NTS DJ Moxie.
On the other hand, the subdued drums and vinyl crackle of ‘FM’ and the slow-mo dreariness of ‘I’ve Been Thinking A Lot Lately’ verge a little too close to the trite comforts of ‘Kindred’-era Burial, and the album is generally symptomatic of a common difficulty that many club producers have in making full-lengths, with emotive and long-winded tracks that frankly just aren’t that interesting.
A key comparison point here is Jon Hopkins, who features on the album’s anthemic title track ‘Baby We’re Ascending’ and who HAAi counts as a close friend and collaborator. At his best, Jon Hopkins’ tracks carefully balance the pure energy of heavy washes of brute sound with a wobbly sense of groove, the sort that can keep a massive festival crowd dancing until the wee hours of the morning while also keeping your average home-listener interested. Unfortunately, HAAi’s music here tends to be a bit stiffer, forgoing the benefits of a heady groove in favor of direct impact. If you’re up for it, it might well help you ascend, but it often feels like a forced way to go about it.
6/10
Words: Louis Torracinta
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