Portable — Believing

Producer, vocalist and experimentalist Alan Abrahams has been releasing music under his Portable and Bodycode guises for twenty years. Seamlessly forging his South-African heritage with a futurist house sensibility, he has explored a consistently warm, lived-in and evocative sound through countless albums, EPs and live performances. Now based in Paris, following stints in London, Lisbon and Berlin, Abrahams adapts his assured taste to a brand new label, ‘Khoikhoi’.

Khoikhoi, der bereits zahlreiche Veröffentlichungen auf renommierten Labels wie Perlon, Ghostly International, !K7, Dial und dem 2002 von ihm und Lerato Khathi alias Lakuti gegründeten Label Süd Electronic vorweisen kann, bringt mit Believing" eine neue EP mit tragbarem Material auf den Markt, das ebenso hoffnungsvoll, ehrlich und berührend ist wie Abrahams beste Arbeiten.

Although characterised by the melancholy often worn on his sleeve, Abraham’s productions are equipped with the sort of rhythmic precision that can only arise from years on the fringes of the world’s finest dancefloors. This knowledge and deft drum-handling is executed perfectly on the title track, ‘Believing’, which spans more than ten-minutes rich in sentiment and percussive pleasure. A truncated dub version without Abraham’s vocal contribution proves equally compelling in it’s perfectly measured reductions.

Le Morne" erkundet derweil das angespannte, untere Ende von Portables Sound und navigiert durch eine geräumige Reflexion, wobei dasselbe Gefühl der Wehmut durch Lichtspalten in den schweren Bassfrequenzen des Tracks schleicht.