Review: James Ferraro - Sushi

Sushi is sexy. Not just for the blatant moon-eyed romanticism of its floaty chord exchanges, or for the slow-shifting hums of bass that slink into the pit of the stomach as vibration and then work their way down; it’s also curvaceous and smooth in shape, comprised of soft, rainbow-coloured bubbles of sound that slink in between and inside eachother. Each individual electronic pulse is part of a loose – but unmistakably unified – central throb, and regardless of the many individual rhythms that comprise Sushi at any given moment, the whole construction rises and falls in intimate synchronisation, like the contraction/expansion of a torso under the weight of deep, slow breaths.

I feel squashed up within it all, and there’s a perverse pleasure to the sensation of those soft, fleshy synthesisers pressing inward against the sides of my head. Fizzing hi-hats and snare drums cram themselves into whatever space is available, creating beats that stumble through syncopations while making the whole thing look bizarrely graceful; vocal samples are mutated and cycled ad infinitum; synth loops are chopped untidily until they stammer; bass pounds with such weight that the rest of instrumentation feels as though it might be hauled downward into the low-frequency abyss. It’s a dance record, but one that coaxes its audience into semi-conscious sways of sickly sensual overload – the jerky, ultra-dense soundtrack to that tipping point between being blissfully drunk and finally passing out on the dancefloor.