Hudson Mohawke & Tiga’s shared club love spills all over collaborative party piece L’ecstasy

To scratch a small surface, Hudson Mohawke has lent his ear and frenetic wonky style to groundbreaking hip-hop records (from Kanye West's Yeezus to Travis Scott's UTOPIA) while defining the last decade’s trap influence in TNGHT alongside Lunice. Montreal electronic scene legend Tiga is no stranger to Ross Birchard, having shared DJ sets before spending the best part of four years jointly pitching in influences for their Love Minus Zero project. While the results-may-vary unpredictability may have been foreshadowed by their different approaches, there’s no denying the duo’s expertise and admiration for the ups and downs of the dancefloor – a self-dubbed “hardcore romance” of nights lost to reverie.

This mood shrouds the whole of L’ecstasy, a bag of goodies that’s never one-lane in style and instead imagines the only grounds where Tiga and HudMo’s studio collision course could co-exist. Layered percussive loops get straight down to business on the aptly-named opener “Exit Warehouse at Dawn”, where shimmering synths widen the space for a gloomy drop to level the whole place. The switch from melancholia to on-edge throttle is masterfully played by the pair here, while throbbing echoey techno rings long after “BUYBUYSELL” finishes, and “Ascending Into The Clouds” showcases the vocals of garage legend Elisabeth Troy, only manipulated to take the voyager to breathless new heights. As a whole, it's a rich propulsive rave from the future that encapsulates the primitive joy of collective club experience.

Alongside more dance-ready cuts, the producers’ boundless puppeteering dashes through various stages of insular heightened emotion, self-absorbed hard partying and crowd-fuelled revelry at the drop of the hat, but their fascination for cheeky experimentation also makes the curated club night experience something otherworldly. “Night Is Not” is ramped-up to the kitschy speeds of an 80s action movie, filmic in its over-the-top dialogue – “please hold my hand and tell me that the night is not as dark as it seems” – before cutting to and from thrusting two-step verses. The panic inducing industrial sounds that make up “LMZNIN” or “Theme from Borneo Function” have a dramatic alienness, even more so from the latter’s vocal samples seemingly taken from rogues at Mos Eisley Cantina. Underlying it all though is the dominant universal force of love bringing you right back to earth no matter how strange things get. Single “Silence of Love” heralds the ghosts of club classics past, and four-on-the-flour centred “Feel The Rush” features a wonderful onomatopoeic vocal from Channel Tres, emphasising music’s power to help express and admire yourself.

With a title track proclaiming the project’s name, sampling thrilling screams, intermingling real and electronic instrumentals, and even blowing a celebratory fanfare, it crunches down what the compilers do best across the record. L’ecstasy is a worthy, scattered advertisement for a dance destination made by and for Tiga and HudMo’s tastes, with an open invitation to join in however you see fit.