One of the Bay Area's finest homegrown bass music producers, Secret Recipe, comes correct with a new four-track release titled, appropriately, The Future is Never Here. The EP invites listeners into a kaleidoscope of precise, rarified sound design while demonstrating a progressive, non-linear approach to songwriting.

Benji Hannus (Secret Recipe) can craft many a dancefloor banger. With this release, however, we find him constantly returning to the drawing board to conjure one-of-a-kind, highly cinematic compositions that are barely patterned on contemporary dancefloor electronic music. Songs like "Eventually" contain a series of movements unto themselves, short sections where a specific musical idea is developed fully, or not, before being dissolved into a new idea. Like a series of sonic spells, Secret Recipe casts these to excite your ears.

This style distinguishes The Future is Never Here from other Secret Recipe music, which is itself distinguished from other bass music. This does not come about by chance, but rather by careful study. Few producers have had the opportunity to see performances from and correspond with as many or their peers as Benji. As one of the principals of Wormhole Entertainment and Wormhole Music Group and an independent promoter before that in Santa Cruz, Hannus has facilitated sets from countless producers, particularly over the past six years through the Wormhole Wednesday weekly parties in Oakland. We'd hunch that witnessing so many performances from his contemporaries subtly or not so subtly motivated Hannus to swerve with Secret Recipe music and pursue roads less traveled.

The title for this release is thought provoking. Is the future never here because it's instead always the present? Or rather because once it arrives, the future is no longer the future. Either way, this koan appears to point at a desire to innovate endlessly, to harness the new before it becomes old or even before it becomes current. Secret Recipe's potent sound design, while scoring highly, does not hit the bullseye of innovation. His means of conceptualizing songs, though, does indeed. Writing bass music under few compositional constraints; that's the innovation of The Future is Never Here.

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