Offshore

With bombastic new-school artists like Dorian Concept, Hudson Mohawke and Rustie cranking their digital output to 11, Ewan Robertson (aka Offshore) offers a little club comedown on Bake Haus. Treating neo-electro with the same beat slashing, steady hand that birthed chillout from techno, Offshore keeps the BPMs slow and low on tracks like "Lifes Too" and "Slip." Working with meaty beats and skeletal rhythms — in direct contrast to dubstep's M.O. — the Scottish producer utilizes myriad sounds, shaping the personality of each track via alien effects and processed live instrumentation like guitar ("Fraser") and percussion ("Back Wynd"). While half of the album's tracks hover under the two-minute mark, Offshore prevents Bake Haus from sounding like a collection of incomplete ideas, thanks to his often fearless, always strange and sometimes disaffecting method of structuring songs. Bake Haus is a wholly original piece of art that relies on the exhausting of ideas and themes, but never comes off sounding tired.