With the skipping vocals of Kučka whirling around, the wonky shuffling beat and its doof-doofing kick, the glitching ectoplasms of synth like electronic phantasms of auroraborealis offcuts, Flume's bonus track 'Hyperreal' is a paragon of its titular promise. There's a dim darkness effused by the track, framed by a sense of cold futurism, something minimal and menacing, and it's this theme that Laced seems to have picked up on in their reworking. With a decided focus on those thudding kicks, the musicmaker strews them in four-on-the-floor formation for a deep and devastating house feel; hi-hats like daggers unsheathing and cutting the air add rasping sharpness to the shuffling rhythm; a constant synth rumbles balefully below.
And then you realise at around 00:58 that a lot of those sounds weren't hi-hats at all but overlapping inhale-exale breaths sampled and shivering, isolated for their impact before a tidal wave of sound begins, a break in the house regularity, a swaying from rapid gloopy kicks and sub-bass bwaoom to clacking rolling snare and a twinkle of metallic ticking. An unexpected part of the song, splitting sounds in two and letting them crash into the slices of silence, this segment does not refrain later on but instead remains a totemic midsection between the hard thudding house vibes, the garage-tinged shuffle of everything—it's a natural evolution of the original track (like the artwork: a darker version of the artwork for Flume's Skin Companion EP II), but it's replete with a dark and dusty emotiveness of its own.
- 🔔 Listen to more Laced tracks over on their SoundCloud.
