Available on: Seed 12″

Mixed sampler

Maya Medvesek’s first full EP, for the established Seed label, confirms a couple of things. For one, the Glasgow and London based artist offers nothing as crude as her 8Bitch alias suggests – anyone preparing for a barrage of chiptune jests can stand down. Second, as her mini-mix for FACT indicated in January, to any one genre she’s at most an interested outsider.

Dependency on several more concrete styles being a key thread, in a way it makes sense to put Medvesek in the category of electronica – slightly fallen out of favour as the term may be. The trend among her contemporaries (cursed temporarily with the ungainly tag ‘wonky’) is to hyper-activate the approach into multiplied, magpie form, but by contrast she works with a discipline more common to past generations of producers.

On Equinox, the comparison happens to go further, as she chooses to revive several devices familiar from the back catalogues of labels such as Warp. This includes deadpan, computerised beat-juggling, filigrees woven of sine-wave sibilance, and a crystalline, ambient coda to the EP. It can only be to her credit that it all sounds unexpectedly ripe once more for appreciation. But her execution is so unshowy it wouldn’t be too surprising if it underwhelmed over-fatigued ears. This would be a shame, because if the results seem slight, it’s deceptive – closer listening reveals a producer with a pixel-perfect grasp on what she’s doing.

All that said, it’s ironic that the best inclusion might be the only to dabble in ideas of the zeitgeist. ‘Hathor’ pivots around snares and congas in dubstep mode, glossed with loops of a cooing vocal sample. This parts midway for a blissfully inclined, pitch-bent sustain of the sort for which Joy Orbison is celebrated. As dancefloor material, there’s no objective reason why it shouldn’t be due a reception equally warm, too.

Medvesek has pulled a good pair of moves here, rising to trends with no embarrassment to herself while elsewhere showing a refreshing indifference. It’s almost certain to send her name on the up very quickly.

Robin Howells