I have to admit that the term Slap House has only been on my radar for a short while, it seems that in a world largely shrugging off genres it is the world of dance music that still holds fast to its demarcations and boundaries. I guess you have to be ingrained in the scene to know what all the labels mean, but if you are not and you want to know what Slap house is all about, Antidote is a great place to start the learning curve.
Grooving along around the infectious 120bpm mark, a hallmark of the genre, it combines smooth production with liquid beats, balances chilled-out interludes with high-energy crescendoes and whilst it echoes with clubland sonic traditions sits at the forward edge of new EDM.
And as a new (in the grand scheme of things anyway) genre, Slap House can be easily understood through a song like Antidote. The deeper you listen, the more keenly you engage with it, the more you can hear the musical family tree that spawned the genre, can understand exactly which generic giants shoulders it stands on.
You can hear the deep grooves of the Brazilian Bass which is its most recent parent, as well as the electronic take on jazz-funk and soul that spawned Deep House, which provides the broad umbrella that most of the related modern dance scenes sit under.
The most surprising aspect of all is that this is asmoo’s debut single, asmoo being the guise under which Ian Runge makes his music. Many artists do their growing up in public, the music that they release cataloguing their false starts and gradual evolution. Not so asmoo. If Antidote is not the sound of a breaking new artist landing in the public conscience full realised and perfectly formed, I don’t know what is.
