XAVIER BONFILL 1000 CUCS (MUS.HIBA REMIX)

Hello. How are you? I've always been interested in writing about the music of mus.hiba; from Tokyo, they're just one person who makes electronic music. I think I first stumbled across them when I was having a mooch around over at Zoom Lens, collective and label part-masterminded by Meishi Smile – mus.hiba is a part of Zoom Lens, if you didn't know what I was getting at by that. In any case, I'm here now and I'm writing about them which is fine.

But the spotlight isn't entirely on mus.hiba; it's actually not an original track but a remix of a little something-something by Barcelona trackmaker Xavier Bonfill. In addition to having a really cool name, he also makes some pretty cool music: the song in question, '1000 cucs', is a quasi-bizarre, alternative pop affair, filled with crunchy saw-wave synths and catchy vocals that sing the refrain "mil cucs", which I learned is "a thousand worms" in Catalonian. An interesting song on its own, mus.hiba's remix soaks it in a dreamy atmosphere and hangs it out to dry in a world where each gentle breeze tastes of the fresh and vital land.

Dotting the track with a clacking beat whose cracking slaps of percussion, and fidgety kicks, summon up a juke feel, providing a rhythmic flow that underpins the rest of the song's sound like a colourful bridge. Delicate flute sounds play a plaintive tune before fizzing synth leads bust in above unintelligible vocal samples from Xavier's original. The drop a little less than halfway through is heralded by a twisting flourish of ghetto snares, and arrives in the form of wildly phasing synths – tireless waves of gushing electronic gales, washing through your brain as if your thoughts were mere mist for a minute. Then we fade out, followed by crystalline clusters of sharp synth – v pretty.

It's an unabashedly chillwave tune – chillwave may have disappeared, a kinda dead genre, but to make and label stuff under this title is not only wonderfully individual, in that it ignores the flow of the majority, but it is also warming to see that people make what they wanna make. Who gives a sheisse if chillwave is so two years ago? Anyway, this song comes from the second remix EP, IX​=​? B (Made in Japan), that has followed Xavier Bonfill's release of last year, 9=0, and you can listen to & purchase both on XB's Bandcamp.

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