January: 10 drum 'n' bass releases you need to hear this month

Homemade Weapons 'Negative Space' (Samurai Music)

Seattle’s Andre Delgado can respectfully claim to be a key player in drum ‘n’ bass’s half-time production gold-rush. His precise experimentation in moody minimalism over the past three years – which has promoted classic jungle break edits rat-tatting and evaporating above cavernous, textured, 85/170bpm half-time kicks – now finds its apex in ‘Negative Space’, a debut LP stuffed to the gills with masterful percussive workouts, yawning chasms of space and hand-stitched industrial soundscapes. These 12 tracks exhume the bones of helter-skelter 90s breakbeats and layers them into ceaselessly inventive technoid adventures, all finished with a sumptuous grainy aesthetic to rival anything we’ve heard from those at the sharpest edges of 170bpm bass science. Your adventure starts here.

9/10