“Workaround 2” is the perfect soundtrack for a day – 29 February – that only exists once every 4 years. It’s from the first album by UK electronic music producer Beatrice Dillon, and it’s an album that blurs boundaries and stylistic conventions and exists in it’s own time-zone.
There seems to be a bit of genre-warping-everything about this unpredictable and ever-shifting combination of rhythmically-uplifting beats, UK club music (techno/ house), electronica, Afro-Caribbean jazz, experimental avant-garde, and musique-concrete.
There’s elements here in “Workaround 2” – with its disembodied vocal from Laurel Halo – that seem similar in approach to the “Fourth World” style of Jon Hassell (especially the recently re-issued “Flash of the Spirit” album with Farafina) but Dillon’s creations are light of touch and full of space to allow the tension and interplay between elements work.