Iamyank – Cold Summer EP

Hungarian bass music producer Iamyank released his 4 track Cold Summer EP last week, and today he put the whole thing up on youtube in 720. While it’s less dancefloor-oriented than other stuff heard from him, it’s an incredibly well crafted bass music, touching on idm, folktronica and future bass.

Both of the vocal pieces on this record are utterly fantastic (and I’m about the harshest critic you’ll find of bass music with vocals). It’s the kind of music I LOVE to have stuck in my head. You can buy it on Bandcamp right now for a mere 3 Euro, or stream it right here:

The first cut, Aurora, is an original tune with vocalist Dori Hegyi (pictured above on the right). I’ve been looking forward to more stuff from them ever since their first collab, a revelatory cover of “My Guy” (inexplicably titled “Billie Holiday Pt 2”). If you love bass music with soulful vocals, you MUST hit play below.

While his productions prior to this were excellent, they were still constrained by genre. ‘Yank explains how this release is different (emphasis our own):

‘At the start of 2013, I stopped working on funk-glitch-hop music, and started to create my first 4-track EP, which is more personal and open than anything I had done before… I started producing label and dj-friendly glitch hop because I didn’t feel that I had anything to express, but I enjoyed the challenge of meeting the technical expectations. Later on I felt the need to express my own emotions, so technicality and genre became a tool instead of a necessity.

These new songs are much more personal, because I started to explore my introverted side, and I gave it a chance to unfold, this is why the tracks on the EP are much more intimate. And by open, I mean that I didn’t make these to be played on the radio, or to be sold in online shops, I didn’t care about how easy would it be to categorize them, or to make them danceable or anything. They became what they are because of what they wanted to be, without any limitations.’

The introspection paid off – these are songs, not just tracks. There’s real emotional weight here. With this release, he’s moving into the same field as artists like Amon Tobin, Mount Kimbie and Jon Hopkins; electronic musicians that employ technicality to tell a story, not just to celebrate itself. I can’t wait to see where he goes next.

Buy the Cold Summer EP on Bandcamp. Do it. Do it right now.