The greatness of Basic Channel, particularly the way the duo’s best work is mixed by Scion on Arrange and Process, is that the music moves between visions of actual stars and visions of stars in a disco, between galaxies and disco ball effects.
“Q1.2” and “Radiance III” are examples of the former, and “Infinition” and “Phylyps Rmx” are examples of the latter. In “Q1.2”, we are transported, as if by Carl Sagan’s Spaceship of the Imagination, to a star nursery, a marvelous cloud of gas and dust where stars are born. In “Phylyps Rmx,” we return to the dance floor, with its glittering ball, swirling spotlights, and rising clouds of dry ice. We can never get enough of this shift from the galactic to the plastic, the grand to the cheap, the divine to the profane. Something of this is also in the music of Boxcutter.