Three winters past Goth-Trad’s sublime “New Epoch”, the Japanese gorgon returns home in Deep Medi with a single featuring a reconfigured classic and DMZ speaker worship. Speaker worship aside, fans have been foaming at the mouth for some new Goth Trad (Back to Chill doesn’t count, that’s another story) and I’m positive that us stateside heads will hear plenty of VIPs and new dubs as GT is (at this moment) touring the US. I’ll have the opportunity to see him spin some acetates on October 28th with Sam Binga in DC. It’s gonna get messy!! Anyway…

“Sinker” is possessed by the momentum of the industrial revolution. A foghorn sirens across the expanse of an irradiated sea, a steam engine builds pressure enough pressure to move its wrought iron frame, thin blue smoke plumes up toward the sky. The iron and brass fixtures are implanted into a classic ’06 style wubbler with tasteful LFO waves and its intent to shake more than a few ceiling tiles loose in some dimly lit, poorly ventilated Brooklyn basement. The Birmingham greyness of it all is yoked away with a fleeting, elegiac bell-like vesper never to reappear again that makes “Sinker” all the more poignant, elevating the tune beyond a simple DMZ re-tread.

On the flip is where Goth-Trad gets interesting with “Sunbeam VIP”. Deconstructing the alchemical keys from the original into new cubist forms that differentiate the VIP from its rolling, meditative father. Whereas the original would build its caveman stomp into tribalist ecstasy, “Sunbeam VIP” subtracts. Chopping phrases, snippets, and mimetic Vine-like repetitions into an off-kilter, techno-esque hybrid – chipping away the mortar and excavating in a sleeker, more rhythmically kinky approach that sounds solely unique to Goth-Trad and nobody else at the moment.

If I were you, I’d bag this strictly for the B-side – its cubist sound design and technoid approach outshine the restrained industrial-tinge of “Sinker” hands down. Though that’s no slight against the A-side either with its gut churning sub-weight and floor minded agenda, it’ll definitely go off inna dance rest assured. After a quiet absence and his focus on Back to Chill over the past couple years, it’s great to see Goth-Trad return back to Deep Medi for some much needed education on how to do dubstep right by not sounding like a Gantz or LAS clone.

MEDi089 is still available to pre-order from Unearthed Sounds, White Peach, Kudos and Juno Records.