The Range - Potential (Domino)

The Range – Potential (Domino)

The digital media revolution didn’t begin with Google.  It might be the search engine the world relies on, but all it does is filter the information and ideas of the world.  It doesn’t produce or share content the way social media does.  The growth of YouTube is the most important moment in the formation of digital life: it allows us access to people and places we would never experience, and it allows us to share our own life and culture with those we have no contact with.  Even with adverts and sponsored content, YouTube’s freedom of expression and ease of availability is a utopian fantasy of equal platform, where everyone has a fair shot at their fifteen minutes of fame.  That potential is the Potential suggested by The Range’s second album, a bass-heavy electronica album built around samples from forgotten uploads in the site’s most neglected corners.

Potential comes with a lot of cultural baggage (to be explored further in Superimpose, a documentary following producer James Hinton as he explores the sources of his samples).  But as an album, it’s basically a collection of introverted experiments in club music dynamics.  There’s deep dubstep-leaning bass, euphoric piano-house chords, squiggly neon synths and beats that owe as much to proper hip-hop as they do the safer-end of trip-hop.  ‘1804’ is soft chords around dancehall chatter, while ‘Skeptical’ is an obvious pun on one of grime’s biggest figures as it holds a British rap, but they are outliers on an album that’s centred more around samples of singing and speaking.  Potential sounds a lot like the story of dance music over the past few years – equal parts Four Tet and Flying Lotus, with warehouse-ready sounds reconfigured for headphone listening.

But where those acts can seem dry, their music uncomfortable as an exercise in removed context, Hinton imbues his work with emotional gravitas through creative sampling.  Potential conjures echoes of Burial in the way samples are altered to fit musically, finding melodies and rhythms in natural patterns of speech.  The most obvious comparative point is Jamie XX’s album In Colour, which treated its own samples with a similar sense of reverence and awe.  But while that album suffered by being too in thrall to rave while misunderstanding the euphoria and joy at the heart of it, Potential succeeds by focussing on the textural profundity of club experiences.

This is an album that deals in big and broad sentimentality.  Without any sense of nuance or subtlety, Potential’s relentlessly widescreen scope can feel overwrought and draining over forty minutes.  But it’s easy to imagine moments like ‘Florida’ and ‘Superimpose’ as 5am club-closing apex moments of misty-eyed nostalgic joy, regardless of context and backstory.  The opening track starts with a sample that feels like The Range’s mission statement: “right now, I don’t have a back-up plan for if I don’t make it/but even if…/I’ll just decide to move on.”  Potential is a love letter to dance music as it does the thing it does best: finding fresh sources of inspiration and pushing itself in new directions.

God is in the TV is an online music and culture fanzine founded in Cardiff by the editor Bill Cummings in 2003. GIITTV Bill has developed the site with the aid of a team of sub-editors and writers from across Britain, covering a wide range of music from unsigned and independent artists to major releases.