CD: Hieroglyphic Being - The Disco's of Imhotep

Sia, Mo, Adele, Lukas Graham and Coldplay. Those are artist names that speak of a general desire to make their owners accessible to the mainstream. Hieroglyphic Being is not that kind of name and the music he makes is equally abstruse. He’s called this album The Disco’s of Imhotep, which implies it will be danceable and have some conceptual association with mystical healing. It’s certainly danceable, but its edges are not gentle, and it’s also wilfully tricksy in places.

Hieroglyphic Being is the stage name of Jamal Moss, who’s been putting out music prolifically on his Mathematics label for nigh on a decade. A serious man with enormous dreadlocks, he grew up in difficult circumstances in Chicago but made a home for himself amid the city's clubbing underground. He took the sounds he heard there and mutated them into something less straightforward.

The Disco’s of Imhotep is Moss’s first for Ninja Tune’s techno/weird-tronic sub-label Technicolour. Apart from muffled, faintly disturbing voices wafting about the murky closer, “Nubian Energy”, it’s instrumental, indeed, primarily percussive. Moss has worked with Marshall Allen of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, and there are injections of jazz here and there, but mostly they fall in the shadow of harsher machine sounds. “Spiritual Alliances”, for instance, has an almost Roy Ayers-ish groove going on quietly behind the track’s Detroit-tech pulse. Perhaps best is the title track which begins as a bath of Aphex Twin-like robot twinkles, twists and whistles before slowly gathering a kick-drum from its squirling depths.

There are snippets of distorted abstraction and tunes that are clearly aimed mainly at DJs, such as the 4am groover “Crocodile Skin”, but The Disco’s of Imhotep is an album whose android facelessness masks a peculiarity that’s often intriguing.