In 2011, Glasgow’s LuckyMe stable hosted two releases from Jacques Greene; The Look, and Another Girl. With highly regarded tastemakers like LuckyMe, it’s often rewarding to have faith if the name seems familiar. As ever, with Jacques Greene, it paid off. The Look showcased a producer with enormous control over his sound – a woozy, awkward house music with vast, unusual club potential. What was clear, however, was that Greene wasn’t dealing in quite the same brand of head-spinning, heart-pumping rush offered by other spun-to-death moments of the year, but instead meted out considered, sample-heavy electronic movements that fully deserved the wide attention they garnered. It’s exciting, as such, to see Greene returning, with new material in a new home. On his new VASE imprint, Greene seems to have indulged somewhat further in pause-for-thought atmospherics than in his previous works, moving palpably into new, interesting pastures.’Flatline’, featuring vocals from LuckyMe cohort Ango, is bound to disarm anyone convinced they could chart Greene’s next sonic movements. Not until around the halfway point does ‘Flatline’ become something resembling Greene’s past works – instead it feels like patchwork experimentation, a musical pop-culture collage: interesting, but perhaps a little too knowingly “of the movement” to be entirely comfortable. Sometimes you’ll catch flashes of Drake’s cavernous, mournful R’n’B or smatterings of The Weeknd’s vaporous atmospherics within Greene’s hollowed-out electronics; it’s admittedly zeitgeist-y, but for the most part it dodges derivativeness. Greene’s long standing affinity with minutely warped house has clearly developed since The Look turned heads in 2011, and Concealer‘s tumbling 808 snares and snatches of pitch-warped R’n’B vocals could easily suggest another pot-luck bandwagon jumper catching the tail end of last year’s most fashionable production techniques. Greene however, offers a little more.

There’s nothing cursory about the spiralling “Girl/I really didn’t wanna” of ‘These Days’: it’s precision-cut, tailor-made and fraught with atmosphere in a manner that many producers employing similar, more obligatory samples, fall short of. Greene’s collaboration with much-lauded Glaswegian wunderkind Koreless on ‘Arrow’ takes the EP further from the strung-out, codeine- and helium-dosed R’n’B vocals and onto more unusual ground for Greene. It’s about as far removed from the traditional dancefloor circuit as we’ve seen him, but the 9 minute, filter-washed exercise in immersion is so carefully polished that it makes for easy, if not exhilarating listening – a perhaps suitably unusual end to a particularly oddly balanced release.Concealer‘s consistency – or apparent lack thereof – is one of its most fascinating qualities.

Segueing neatly through loping, breathy R’n’B, misty atmospherics and into Greene’s recognisable house tropes, it’s all interesting fare and Greene’s new movements are pulled off – employed – with aplomb. This, however, is the strangest facet of Concealer: with the exception of pacing house number ‘Clark”s aqueous synths, much of it feels like tentative steps, new ideas, transitional. It’s not a fault of Greene’s production – in fact, his particular brand of sample-shot electronics has never sounded so fascinating, so full of depth. It does, however, feel as if Greene has been caught in development, as if somewhere between the dancefloor shimmer of his first tentative steps and some distant future release we’ve found him, part-submerged in blissed-out, reverberating synths, eyes still part-fixed on the clubs. More than anything, this makes Greene an essential producer to keep eyes on, and Concealer a vital release for fans of electronic music’s more pensive, developmental moments.

Listen to Concealer