This Other Space: The Tom EP

When I first agreed to clear some time in my busy social calendar to write for ISM I had just two caveats.

The first being that I was not going to let it all go to my head now that I had hit the big time and would be raking in the money, getting on all the lists & traveling to endless festivals to complain about the short DJ sets and the unappreciative audiences who just don’t get what really matters. The second caveat had something to do with not reviewing the records/releases/labels of close friends.

Fast forward to this past weekend and me stepping off my private jet from a quick weekend in Berlin. I had flown into town for a forty minute all improvisational analog hardware jam that really proved to me the value of labor. I remembered something Adorno said about how improvisation is never actually that, but rather a performance of habits, but quickly realized that was something an academic would think and promptly took three pills. Following that performance, and gurning my face off in security, I returned to the airport because Berlin is so 2012.

I cleared my head with a quick hit of English White Label as I stepped off the jet bridge to only realize someone had stolen my Versayce slippers and that journalistic integrity was overrated and I should be writing about music that I was feeling and which delivered the damn goods.

So I texted my interns to let them know the score and to hit publish on what follows.

The Tom EP by This Other Space is coming out September 11th on Tasteful Nudes, a label run by my dear friend Steve “Shoeless Mix” Mizek. This three track EP by The Other Space comes for you right from the start. Eye of the Cosmic, the lead track, is the kind of song that immediately catches your attention with a strong bass line snapping at you from the start. It’s the kind of track I love to hear come into the mix after the party’s been popping for a minute.

Eye of Cosmic is spare and stripped back, smartly programmed, nothing extraneous and the thing that I really come back to is that the whole time this track is giving you the goods, it’s not doing it in a cheap or obvious way. So often people just go for the short cut when producing dance music, you know there’s an easy way to formulaically trigger ecstatic reverie and you just slot it in. Eye of the Cosmic takes the other route, smartly moving through percussion rife with a funky and fun palette, catchy and simple melody lines and bass line in a way that keeps things fresh without going for that big cheap shot. I’ve been playing it for the last three days on a loop after Steve accidentally pasted it into the messenger we were chatting on (spoiler alert, it wasn’t Scruff) and I’m glad he did.