Dancin’ in the Streets

Google “Tom Boogizm” and the internet coughs up a blank: a lone Boiler Room set, a now-defunct NTS Radio show, a rarely-tended-to SoundCloud page. A Boomkat one-sheet for Dancin’ In The Streets, the DJ and producer’s latest release under the name Rat Heart, offers precious little clarity, just that he hails from Wigan, a town in the northwest of England. Until recently, the British online music retailer was also the only place one could purchase the record. The likes of Cindy Lee, Alabaster dePlume, and Standing on the Corner have all delayed streaming’s instant gratification with their latest projects, but Dancin’ In The Streets’ relative inaccessibility felt more like a protective measure. Most albums create realms you can enter and exit with a tap; step inside this one, and the door slams shut in your wake.

It’s dark in here. Dust coats every surface. Shattered blues riffs pockmark the open spaces in between. On “NOT 2NITE,” an upright piano, electric guitar, and fluctuating dub pulses coalesce into a phantom jazz trio. Boogizm works within forms that resemble traditional folk and blues idioms—there’s even a barely adorned classical flamenco number—but in photo-negative. Dancin’ In The Streets is really a collection of sounds around instruments: the sampled birdcalls on album opener “I H T”; ambient room noise; notes so heavily reverbed that they continue travelling out past the point of audibility. Adam Sinclaire’s concert flute offers intermittent companionship throughout the tracklist, a bit of the glimmer that flecks “She Turns Down” off Cat Power’s Moon Pix. Few have approached that record’s oppressive umbra since its release in 1998, and Boogizm can now claim to be among them.

Dancin’ In The Streets is profoundly immersive, but far from insular. The album’s guestlist, which includes Sinclair, Switzerland-based singer Cansu Kandemir, and a mysterious figure who goes by “Tha Payne,” reads like the membership of a secret society. Boogizm himself is conversant with the warped fringes of contemporary popular music: the Dijon-Mk.gee bitcrush-R&B braintrust, for one, or Dean Blunt, Joanne Robertson, and Elias Rønnenfelt’s extended universe of gothic neo-folk. Like a campfire singalong played around the ashes, “(DON’T) SAY MY NAME” would nestle right into Blunt’s Black Metal 2. “SELNE” sounds like a demo of a Jai Paul demo. The digitally paper-shredded “SHINE YOUR GRACE ON ME” and “OPERATION ALWAYS BE A BRAVE LITTLE CUNT” sound like natural continuations of BJ Burton’s work alongside Low and Bon Iver.

“I feel things changing,” Boogizm croons on “I H T,” “Since you’ve been gone…living in hard times.” As his voice—husky yet tender, usually stacked and pitched up or down—flits in and out of intelligibility, Dancin’ In The Streets seems to chart a dark night of the soul. On “(DON’T) SAY MY NAME,” Boogizm plays a lonely demon begging not to be summoned. “REAL HARDCORE PLEASURE” brushes up closest to the abyss, trapping us behind the eyes of a man trawling an escort website. Prose artist Ruby Conner reads off a fractured litany of attributes and affirmations: “First-class girlfriend experience. One-to-one. Discreet. Up for anything. Satisfaction guaranteed. I’m a lot of fun. Without emotion. Our time together, anything you want and more, no complications. Your pleasure is my pleasure.”

Salvation arrives, briefly, via the next track, “OPERATION ALWAYS BE A BRAVE LITTLE CUNT.” It’s the closest Boogizm gets to something he could drop during one of his DJ sets, were it not for the neolithic drum machines that threaten to melt into pure feedback. You want it to go on forever. But there is no absolution, and so Dancin’ In The Streets closes with “IGOTDRONESINMYBONES,” a 10-minute flagellant march of industrial clangor and Gregorian synth pads. Sinclair’s flute returns as a will-o’-the-wisp—some ephemeral light we might grasp at only to find it vanish in our hands.

With Dancin’ In The Streets, Boogizm joins the lineage of electronic musicians making exquisite singer-songwriter records. “GREY SKIES, LIES + MEAT & POTATO PIES” and “TOWN, ARDWICK, THEN LEVY; ON FOOT” flip their preceding songs into the sorts of grainy loops that would make for the centerpiece of an Alchemist or Madlib beat. The album’s mixing—the electric guitar’s always a little too loud, the lyrics hard to parse without cranking up the volume—literally pushes listeners away, then pulls us back in close. Obfuscation and hushed disclosure shade Dancin’ In The Streets, their contrast providing a compelling throughline. Now based in Manchester, 20 miles from Wigan, Boogizm must be well-suited to the city’s notorious pollution. He can breathe in smog, breathe out clean air.