Mexico City avant-garde label Lissajous explains that Silencestep, the imprint’s second full release by producer and Ensamble affiliate Me & Myself, uses “silence as a main component.” In well-orchestrated music, that white space of audio can carve out sound arcs and angles, giving listeners’ minds extra time to process.
That’s what happens on “Silencestep 3 (Where Is My Money),” a track we’re premiering today on Remezcla, in ominous fits and spurts throughout the experimental producer’s UK garage-laced journey. The song incorporates aggressive vocal samples from Breaking Bad, Bounty Killer’s “Deadly Zone,” and Sizzla’s “Cyaan Too Much,” imparting a sense of anxiety to Me & Myself’s careful electronic machinations. As Me & Myself told Remezcla over email, “Tranquility and anxiety are moods that oppose each other, but it’s possible to stop in a gray area and feel comfort from both, the mix of two worlds, the organic one and the one created by machines.”
The EP’s complex sound structures bring to mind the notion of music as physical form, an ongoing theme for Lissajous, which was formed by CDMX bass promoters and management agency cuatroveinte to complement the events they started producing as far back as 2013.
The label name is a reference to the Lissajous figure, which is “a pattern produced by the intersection of two sinusoidal curves the axes of which are at right angles to each other.” Different groups who have also adopted the term as their name have pioneered technology that maps sound into shifting visuals that, in fact, would not seem out of place at a cuatroveinte event.
Silencestep’s vibrational buildups are Lissajous’ followup to No Light’s Treason, the label’s first EP release and an aggressive barrage of bass, techno, jungle, and dubstep. No Light also appears on Silencestep, adding a crashing remix alongside one by Tijuana’s Invitado Sorpresa. Their interpretations of Me & Myself’s work do swerve the EP into definitive mind trip territory.
Me & Myself’s Silencestep is out May 19 on Lissajous.