On Paper Wings, Nate Swan takes the nostalgic found-sound collage of his previous bass-heavy work and distills it into a hazy, looping, emotive cut of sample-chop prog house. It's 2006 by way of 2026: Ministry of Sound (Australia)-inspired, no doubt, but with a dusty, alchemical eye to the genre-agnosticism of the past decade. As with everything, Nate straddles the line between sincerity and memetics. Such is life for the gentleman joker.
Nate backs it up with Pliocene: a love letter to the SoundCloud radio rip, and pure B-side material. This is beats for the headz, with 128kbps junkyard breaks and tremolo pads that call to mind Nate’s The Year My Voice Broke EP for Foreign Frequencies. Committed to the bit and the artform, Pliocene wraps with a suitably crusty generic internet radio sting and the first few bars of a second song which serves not only as a nostalgic nod to the DIY radio rips of Nate’s youth, but also as the subversive and meta punchline to an elaborate set up.
Rounding out the release is a remix from long-time collaborator Yage.0k (co-conspirator on the bpm-bending Exhale from The Year My Voice Broke). Yage.0k comes through with a remix for the club DJs that oscillates between twisted Timbaland and weightless trance.