Eris Drew: Quivering In Time (digital, T4T LUV NRG, October 2021)

Eris Drew spent lockdown raving in a cabin in the forest with her girlfriend Octo Octa. Judging by this record, she was having a lot more fun than most of us. I don’t mean that to sound envious: I find it impossible to be mean-spirited about such infectiously joyous music.

‘Cos this album of raved-up house is wall-to-wall bangers. There’s a lot of samples, and in fact everything has a kind of cut-up aesthetic, coupled with a relentlessly lively beat and an almost hyperactively deft touch for melody. There are obvious similarities, in both the sounds and the energy, to Octa’s Resonant Body, but where that felt like a collection of songs, this feels more like a set. She combines an obviously sincere fondness for old-school techno, house, and rave with a cheerfully non-reverential willingness to tear everything up and plunder bits for her own purposes — never more obviously than on Ride Free, which opens with what appears to be a pitch-shifted Terence McKenna sample and then goes on to confidently recontextualize the sample of Frank Maxwell and Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels which is now surely inextricably linked in the public consciousness with Primal Scream’s classic Loaded, a bold move which comes off brilliantly. This is euphoric in the best possible way: not sugary or cheesy, but simply and sincerely revelling in the power of being alive in this moment.

I bought this on Bandcamp.