Try nodding along to this and you will be half a beat wrong before the second bar is out. MALO builds Akai Ito on a bass figure that resets after seven eighth notes instead of eight, over a pulse sitting right at 120. Your foot goes down. The pattern has already started again without you.
The low end swells rather than punches. Each bass note fades up instead of landing, so nothing shoves you forward, and the limp in the count stops reading as a mistake and starts reading as a walk.
He holds the first minute back to almost nothing, sustained C minor chords, no bottom, no top. The bass arrives at last and stays nearly a minute before he takes it away, and he does it twice more. The stretch before the last section runs about eight seconds with nothing underneath, and I counted, because by then I wanted it back badly enough to notice.
The first drop carries a lead that keeps snapping up an octave and falling back. The second lets one high note hang for two full seconds, and after three minutes of constant motion that stillness is the part I wait for. MALO drew the cover himself, which fits a record this particular about its own shape.
It fades out at the end, back to where it started, and I wish it did not. Something that spends nearly five minutes refusing to land on a count you can hold should get to stop on its own terms.
