By Gary Suarez in FARR — Oct 4, 2024

Friday Afternoon Rap Roundup: The Bug

The enduring dub don pushes bass weight to extremes, plus the week's new hip-hop album recommendations

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New Release Highlight of the Week:

**The Bug, Machines I-V (buy it / stream it**)

One of the underground's most persistent producers, Kevin Martin deploys bass frequencies with extreme prejudice. Over the past few decades the UK-bred artist has demonstrated a shamanic devotion to dub and its subgenre kin. In mutating units like Ice, Techno Animal, and Zonal alongside Justin Broadrick, he collaborated with the likes of El-P, Moor Mother, and Vast Aire as well as all three Antipop Consortium rappers. Yet his solo guise The Bug proved his most exploratory endeavor in sound design, freely mixing with grime emcees, dancehall toasters, and avant-garde icons while pushing sound towards a seemingly physical form where its weight could be perceived. Some two decades after the industrial-strength ragga affair Pressure earned him deservedly high marks, he continues to challenge the limitations of soundsystems worldwide in pursuit of greater goals.

Released via heavy metal stalwart Relapse Records, Machines I-V finds The Bug moniker still serving Martin's mission well. Collecting a series of explosive EPs into one volatile package, the 21-song set rumbles and grinds along like an instrumental soundtrack to something unspeakable. (One of its tracks, the pummeling "Drop," was concurrently released as a standalone single with Nigerian-British rapper Magugu on the mic.) Cavernous cuts like "Battered (Curse Of Addition)" and "Departed (Left The Body Behind)" occupy sonic space with ominous implications, while slo-mo head-nod moments "Limbo (Lust And Paralysis)" and "Brutalized (Headwrecked)" harken back to his earlier hip-hop work. Despite a desire by some (myself included) to fill these textures with bars and verses, the intentional wordlessness benefits him here. There's a contemplative layer nestled in the acidic crunch of "Vertical (Never See You Again)" that would've otherwise been lost under vocal chatter. Similarly, the warbling and melodic "Hypnotised (F-cked Up)" needs no outside rhyme scheme to come and thwart its hypnotic dub dissonance.