Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

01. Hyph Mngo
02. Wet Look

Dance music trends tend to move in such quick arcs that we rarely think of the involved artists as "craftsmen"; there is merely time to define a genre and then advance it. It's a little bit surprising, then, that the most trenchant, relevant thing to say about Joy Orbison's* "Hyph Mngo" (first mentioned here by Martin Clark) is that it's a spectacularly well-crafted dubstep song in the same manner that, say, Spoon writes well crafted rock songs: shaping familiar, predictable ingredients into a unique, easily identifiable whole.

The product of 22-year-old South Londoner Peter O'Grady, "Hyph Mngo" finally sees release after months of streams and samples (that its lock-job successfully kept it out of the hands of chatty internet dance geeks for so long is itself a marvel). High-strung and tense, "Hyph Mngo" relies heavily on a distorted, two-chord organ progression that trails the beat by a half-step. The hook is supplied-- and supplied and supplied and supplied-- by a popping, looped soul vocal, a woman feverishly repeating, mushmouthed, "I do," her near-indecipherable syllables justifying the track's oddball title. O'Grady lets the track build naturally, foregoing any discernible crescendo for sturdy, quick repetitions spiced with increasingly space-y synth noise. The track is self-contained, simple, and weirdly uplifting. If you ever thought claustrophobia could feel triumphant, "Hyph Mngo" is your floor-filling jam...www.pitchfork.com