- Kassem Mosse's debut solo album, 2014's Workshop 19, played it safe, consolidating the producer's most beloved tics and tricks into a satisfying double-pack. Disclosure is something quite different, as becomes clear from the opening track. "Stepping On Salt" is about as pleasant as the name suggests. It's a single synth line, basically, undulating in volume and spitting out acrid blasts of hi-end. The Leipzig producer has always shapeshifted, but his hits have shared a few qualities: weathered sound, subtly sensual grooves, oblique melody. Disclosure is light on these things.
Perhaps conscious of this, Mosse frontloads the album with its most welcoming tracks. "Phoenicia Wireless" has a stumbling house beat and elegant smears of pentatonic melody. "Drift Model" is a gooey groove you could listen to on permanent loop. "Collapsing Dual Core" does a good line in rumpled IDM melancholy. Elsewhere, these softer sounds are stripped away and a sharper, stranger style emerges.
A good third of Disclosure consists of sparse tracks: "Galaxy Series 7," "Long Term Evolution," the one-two of "Monomer" (mirage-like, beatless) and the more driving "Galaxy Series 5." The drums are thin, if present at all, and the synths are sandpapery and splattered with gobbets of delay. The weirdest of all is closer "Purple Graphene": a Kassem Mosse track broken apart, its mechanisms are thrown out of whack so that each element lurches to its own rhythm.
These tracks are puzzling at first, but, as is often the case with Mosse, they reveal a hypnotic logic after repeated listens. Though Disclosure isn't as straight-up satisfying as Workshop 19, it has a stronger identity, and it might hint at intriguing new directions for Mosse's music. Its best moments are brilliant: "Aluminosilicate Mirrors," which transforms those scratchy synth patterns into a piece of sinewy, high-speed electro, and the skittish, 140 BPM techno of "Molecular Memories." Neither is the easiest Kassem Mosse track to love, but since when have we looked to him for easy pleasures?
Tracklist01. Stepping On Salt
02. Phoenicia Wireless
03. Drift Model
04. Galaxy Series 7
05. Collapsing Dual Core
06. Monomer
07. Galaxy Series 5
08. Aluminosilicate Mirrors
09. Long Term Evolution
10. Molecular Memories
11. Purple Graphene