Illum Sphere - Glass Album Review
Despite his début album making Contact's top picks of 2014, Sphere-head Ryan Hunn remains something less than a household name. Sure, there have been lesser career accolades than getting a CM gong on his CV so far - stuff like being chosen to deliver DJ sets for Radiohead - but surely we reasoned our thumbs up for Ghosts of Then And Now should've sprinkled it's magic over the Illum Sphere brand, only for it to fall short of the normal commercial turbo our good taste normally applies.

We take this kind of thing seriously and on Glass, so does he, consciously jettisoning the multi-modal style of its predecessor in favour of something more orthodox and set in a narrower context: where before there was a blindfolded sense of mystery about what came next, the Mancunian producer has chosen a slightly blanker, more austere canvas this time round.
Hunn has described this scaling back as giving his music a "Different pace and energy" but the reality is something more prosaic; where before his default was to break into an established vibe by almost ejecting it from the room, now he relies on immersion and more subtle changes of tone. The result is a Europhile bonfire of grooves, led by Fall Into Water's moody dream/mare scape, itself a maze of both straight ahead techno and hypnotic washes, the two layers welded into one sinuous amalgam.
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