Album: Mystery Tiime - Maudlin Tales of Grief and Love

Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.

There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that he should be attracted to the off-ness, alientation and existential unease of late 70s and early 80s post-punk – which is the style he’s built this record around. The scratchy, spidery drum machines, droning notes from cheap synths, and attempts to emulate Jamaican dub space and to de-rockify the electric guitar that you’d find in Young Marble Giants, The Raincoats, early Scritti Politti and suchlike are all here. Every so often there are hints of house music, even disco, but only in on-edge, sketched form.

But this isn’t a record that’s about references. It’s a very, very personal one, painfully so in fact – and the reaching back in time for these musical signifiers seems to be about finding the right palette to express that as it is about musical taste. These are songs about experiences of the hard, cold arbitrariness of life, death and relationships, with lines like “I’m just an idea in your head”, “If I was stronger I’d be dead / My weakness saves me”, “Today I gave a dying man a shave”, all matching the starkenss of the sound. And it’s… beautiful. I mean, it’s not, it’s ugly as sin. But the reality of it, the sense of feeling and sound so perfectly in sync is astounding. It’s a painful, difficult listen that doesn’t offer a lot of respite, but yes, it is beautiful.

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Listen to "Thank You Deeply"