- The artist best known as Perko crafts a masterful storm of trip-hop, dub and downtempo that showcases his collaborative handiwork.
- Like many cutting-edge musicians of note, Fergus Jones got his start playing in a bad rock band. It's what led him to Ableton: in high school, he first used the software to record the music he was making in several failing indie bands. But when those groups ultimately floundered, as bad bands tend to do, Jones discovered how to use the tool to make music for himself—and permanently shifted trajectories.
Jones's years spent experimenting in the bedroom paid off. As Perko, the Scottish producer found an elegant niche within introspective, downtempo club. His 2019 breakthrough, The City Rings, was nimble, full of bright, prickly melodies dancing across bass tremors that you could feel more than you could hear. He was also the man at the helm of the label Felt, where he presented an interest in sounds that were notably grittier than his own work. Integrating the wiry sounds that surrounded him in his rock-filled youth, his label opted for the yowl of industrial guitar racket and the smoked-out interiors of dark ambient. But the label also revealed a depth to Jones's more delicate and UK-influenced stylings, a satisfying meld of trip-hop, dark-sided glitch and laminated grime.
Ephemera, Jones's first album released under his given name, takes Felt's influences and packages them in a portmanteau of '90s-inspired electronica. These nine tracks present an after-hours version of the best Perko records, making for a listening experience filled with strange delights. Shuddering static cosies up to frolicsome trip-hop, pearlescent shoegaze settles near airtight grooves (these sounds are in, haven't you heard?). But what immediately stands out is Jones's collaborative handiwork. This is most apparent on "Heima," where the homey ambient of Huerco S. flutters beneath the ubiquitous, otherworldly coo of James K, whose breathy melisma recalls the heartbreak in '90s singers Tracey Thornton and Elizabeth Fraser. Other familiar names, like Cafe Oto favourite Laila Sakini and FKA twigs collaborator Koreless, also join the album's cast.
In fact, more than Jones's sleek production, his deft use of vocalists immerses us most in Ephemera's seductive haze. Laila Sakini brings her intimate, analgesic pop to "Can't Touch"'s inverted dub. When the chorus emerges, we're left only with a shadow of the original beat—over which Sakini hints at the end of a relationship with wide, glazed-over eyes: "Have you had enough / Have you had enough of this?" On "Tight Knit," the mood thickens into a nervous sludge. Representing the Bristol underground hip-hop label The Cold Light Crew, MCs Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn pass the mic around. Lights go out, walls close in. Over growling bass and fine-tuned 808s, Birthmark mutters in the restless hours after the rave: "Just the utterings of another raver / With a hunger for another serotonin incline."
When Jones strikes out solo, he channels pure hypnosis. An air of modest luxury suffuses the music—like the comfort of eating a two-dollar pizza in your rich friend's marble-tiled kitchen. Jones's head-nodding melodies and subby beats take simplistic, modular shapes, but it's all quiet enough to pulse through library headphones unnoticed. The synthline across the gliding trip-hop of "Stack" is round but also occasionally jagged, calling to mind the odd, curvilinear edges of Bauhaus furniture. "Heap," meanwhile, is stylish dub techno, whose crisp hi-hats and melodies make calm appearances, swirling like puffs of burning aloeswood.
Albums like Ephemera happen when collaboration feels right; when making music with friends and people you admire over Zoom calls and winding jam sessions breaks through to a state of unbridled collective creativity. Jones, while an outstanding producer on his own, reaches satisfying levels of weirdness in collaboration. His work with Koreless, "Been Here And Gone," centres what sounds like the groan of distorted violin, swaying back and forth before it's swallowed into screeching feedback. On "It Should Be (Free)," the album's other collaboration with Huerco S., the pair's tasteful stylings shuttle between surprising pathways. Night falls, birds chatter and angular arpeggios slip past fuzzy pads. Swept into gentle moments like this, the quiet joy of a congenial musical atmosphere is the loudest.
Tracklist01. Yield
02. Heima feat. Huerco S. and James K
03. Tight Knit feat. Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn
04. Stack
05. Can't Touch feat. Laila Sakini
06. Heap
07. It Should Be (Free) feat. Huerco S.
08. A Leap
09. Been Here (And Gone) feat. Koreless