#tom halstead

Two years after second full-length Tooth and 2017’s Notion to Notion 12”, London-based duo Raime (aka Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead) announced the launch of their own label RR. The first release is a new EP titled We Can’t Be That Far From The Beginning. In Medias Res which shows an intriguing tension, fragmented beats and a stunning “management” of the sound space.

Raime reach a pivotal moment in their exceptional catalogue with the mongrel sidewinders of Am I Using Content Or Is Content Using Me?, their first plate for Mumdance & Logos’ Different Circles label and club collective. After years of drilling their message home thru belligerent repetition, the crucial London duo here go fractiously febrile, ephemeral and non-linear, probing a certain sort of feminine pressure across four tracks drawing as much from grime, post-punk and jungle as afrobeats R&B and dembow rhythms, and cannily splashed with samples lifted from the kind of “Fail” videos that hog YouTube’s recommendations sidebar. Taken in context of the black humour and ‘ardcore hauntological spirit which binds all their work, the results form a radical rethink of the Raime sound allowing for more chaos, space and knife-edge vulnerability within their often chokingly tight productions. Where their previous grooves may have felt like tunnelling into a dank rave at London’s core, their current sound better reflects the shifting mosaic of the city’s cultural, socio-economic and political landscape, effectively rendering a brutalist 3D gymnasium or in-progress construction site for their wickedly augmented ideas to cut loose, and quite literally embracing the failure, fleeting emotions and nerve-riding uncertainty that comes with the terrain.

https://culturedarm.com/moin-you-never-end/