Cera Alba – Synthetic Artistry EP

Label: VIVa MusicScore: 8/10

Cera Alba has been working his way through the ranks for a while now. He made his name with a funk-inflected house sound on Hot Creations and now steps out for the first time on Steve Lawler’s club slaying VIVa label.  Toughening up his sounds in the process, the Leeds lad shows he can do chunky house music as well as the best of them.

Up first on his Synthetic Artistry EP is the title track, a full fat bit of booming house music with heavyweight kicks, meaty percussive stabs and a rolling baseline that will make dancefloors sweat, and no mistake.  Next up is The Limit, with its dry, crunchy hi hats and fantastically roaming bassline. All hunched up like a prime garage cut, this one is a subtler shifter but is still prime dancing fodder. Track 3, Bounce, is a steely, teeth clenching tech grinder with squelchy textures, mechanical grooves and deep kick drums all coalescing into a well chiselled groove that gets finished off in style with some well chosen vocal samples. Lastly, Kreuzberg – named after a certain area of Berlin – is the most abstract and industrial themed of all the cuts here. Searching synth stabs, robot baselines and dark, freaky little effects all make it a classic late night tech house cut of the highest order.