Available on: Second Layer 7″

London-Berlin duo Hype Williams’ reputation has been builting steadily over the past year. Their fine untitled album for Carnivals swiftly sold out its limited edition run, and is virtually impossible to find on the second-hand market; a shame, as it really deserves to be heard by as large an audience as possible. The subsequent ‘Han Dynasty I’ 7″ is plenty absorbing, but it pales in comparison to Do Roids And Kill E’rything, a work far more substantial than its 10-minute duration would suggest.

The re-processing and repurposing of pop culture has become a common stategy in post-2005 underground music, whether it’s Ghost Box tapping the spirit of the occult in library music and British television, or James Ferraro cultivating his own sardonic vision of paranoid, post-modern Americana. Hype Williams’ choice of source material may seem crude and obvious in the current climate of YouTube-assisted hypnagogia – the laconic, self-obsessed rhymes of R&B star Drake and the smooth, Mondeo-friendly vocals of Sade – but their treatment of it is singular.

‘Ooovrrr’ sees Hype Williams rip Drake’s bars from the garish orch-soul setting of ‘Over’ and pitch them down in a manner that inevitably recalls the parallel work of Salem, even more so when dry 808 drum-cracks and withered synth notes enter the fray. Thickset subs give the track structure and bounce; there are moments where you feel you might be listening to a genuine ’96 rap tape, ‘Rescue Dawn II’ is superb, low-riding psychedelia, driven by shattering snap-claps and the kind of quaint, faintly euphoric synth melodies redolent of an 80s school science doc about thermoplastic manufacture. ‘The Throning’, a lopsided, distorted cover of Sade’s ‘The Sweetest Taboo’, adds a new dimension of longing and psychic disturbance to the original whilst respecting its unimprovable melodic power.

Trilby Foxx