This young producer from Seattle, known as Virtual Blaze, has seemingly mastered the craft of many current genres in the world of EDM. His brand new album, Five Years Later, easily flits between drum and bass, glitch hop, chill-step and many more. Fuzzy and detuned intermissions edge towards the idea of a fully-realized concept album. The tracks tend to stand alone though and mix/change genres a lot.

Virtual Blaze is the perfect name for an artist who incorporates the mad shouts of the damned and switches them down in a phase of bit-crushed chaos, which seems to be the overriding sound throughout the album. In each brain-splitting track, these fried digital circuit boards cut over the top frequency and stream down in the fills. Vocal samples are not over-used and provide and add atmosphere to the song. In the song Black Wires, the artist waits until half way through to bring in the vocal samples with the song title in it. In these sound engineering choices, artist Virtual Blaze seems to have already found his signature sound.

Though each track is great as a standalone piece, they could flow as an album more. It is impressive that so many genres are being explored and developed, but it may do the album as a whole justice to bring more consistency to that. There is an intro, an intermission and a couple of much more chilled songs towards the end of the album, but it is hard in the world of dance-floor based bangers to bring that flow to a full 12 track album.

What we are left with however is an amazing array of highly mixable tunes, which redefine themselves within the genre that they are exploring. The songs are progressive in their genres, extending the limits of form and length. The start and end tracks of the album are over seven minutes long, which is seldom seen in the rigid confines of the world of DJ orientated dance music.

After listening to a few songs in the album, you will be rethinking your idea of what is possible with dance music. The younger generation are constantly twisting the conventions of the huge variety of music on this scene and this is a fantastic example of how there can be something different and new to hear.

This album is available for $5 on his bandcamp: https://virtualblaze.bandcamp.com/album/five-years...

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