Today’s bass music landscape has a bit of an infatuation with all things dark, serious, and sometimes foreboding. It’s the kind of emotional tension that can breathe life into such a digital, precision-based genre. Shirking off the sometimes formal stiffness of his contemporaries, the Colorado-based producer Craftal eschews dark and mysterious in favor of pure flavor on the Smack Dab EP. 

Part of the allure of Craftal’s music is the almost flippant nature of his productions. Slapstick, left-field rhythms, textures, and samples have been a mainstay in his tunes for years, but the contents of Smack Dab mingle his music’s unique attitude with powerful songwriting and jovial modes. “Smack Dab” hits home with a funked-out meandering bass line, channeling straight groove and bereft of any flashy trappings. It’s refreshingly austere, showcasing a stark contrast between Craftal and many of his peers. Contemporaneous producers often get caught in the details between the details, and the end result can be a washy mess of textures and compression. For Craftal’s music, the details are the big picture, such as with “Apprehecension”. Instead of hiding the glitches and warped shards of audio behind a slew of layers, they’re on full display. The powerful undercurrent of the track carries straight through every texture and stab of synthesis, and that dynamic is the bedrock of Smack Dab. 

Craftal has developed a collection of pocketed tunes across the course of his career. He’s had releases hosted at Aquatic Collective and here at The Rust Music, showcasing glitchy, high fidelity production melded with fluid songwriting and arrangements. His cautious approach to the music he unveils has paid off yet again with an honest, virile array of compositions. If you’re in the market for fresh arrangements and tactile sound design, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for inside Smack Dab.

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