It's one thing to put on a great performance, but to see the absolute potential of that performance is something else entirely- it takes a certain level of vision- a gift of precognition and the commitment to grasp it with both hands... or spin it like a top! Never Dull has one such perceptive yield of musical grace about him. Working from live samples, he's able to manifest crisp yet beautifully ambient forms of house and nu disco that find the latent beauty in even the most wayward specimens of sonic particulate, resulting in each scraped scuttling of audio feeling/sounding fresh and unblemished, like a pentimento that becomes more defined with each brush stroke that glides over it. Released in 2020,
Collection I is the pressing together of three EPs of the same name, along with a filament of scattered singles and rarities, all of which generally denote Never Dull's crucial attention to the interlacing aspects of groove and melody, composing densely tempered and reverby house that soothes the nerves like a warm kiss on a cool summer night.
Collection II rolls together his singles and releases since the previous compilation, and demonstrates his increasing tendency towards tightly structured sequences that exude a sense of loose spontaneity, guided by waiving electric-eel shaped patterns of keys and talkative retro-electro accents that ooze with lysergic flavor, drafted along with enticing vocal melodies that cooly pluck you from your seat and into the train of their tenacious strut. I prefer to listen to both these compilations in sequence and together, as that's how I get the most out of them, as it's the most fun for me and provides the best sense of trajectory that he's pursued as an artist, from his early years on to the present, and this also is why I'm reviewing them together. All told, it's about two hours worth of music, so if you need to break it off, jump around, or just listen to a couple of singles in situ, that's up to you- but I have a feeling that once you slip into the flow of these collections you'll find it's easier to see it through then cut yourself loose from their groovy grip.
