- For someone who’s just at the end of his teens, Alex Clayton aka the perplexingly unpronounceable Asdasfr Bawd (what is that, Welsh?), well, he knows a healthy amount about dance music. A two-tracker in 2015, Nobody / Love demonstrated an awareness of dance history that stretches back further than the two seconds of most baby beat-makers by nicking hooks from both Christina Aguilera and Caribou. The stylistic choices were pretty interesting too: Aguilera got taken for a little footwork-out and Dan Snaith a positively jaunty two-step treatment with echoes of early dubstep.

UK garage and two-step, along with the moments of dubstep before it blew up into a bro-tastic nightmare, all of these things have only persisted on the fringes of dance music for the last five years or so. This is a large part of the reason that they usually sound so damn fresh whenever they come out of hiding. Thank goodness then that Asdasfr Bawd pursues those same sounds in-depth on his new EP, Underpass.

Thank goodness too that we got it: scheduled for release late last year, it was yanked at the last minute accompanied by vague statements about illness. The promo groundwork might’ve been wasted but advance single, Alsp (Welsh again?), is still a slamming meld of footwork and bass, the machine-gun vocal sample spluttering psychotically over the syncopated beats and shuddering bass. It’s a great thing to do, too: following the lead of those producers who’ve gentrified the ghetto sounds of footwork (just a little), allowing its best qualities to spit and hiss manically against the sleeker bass music.

Back at the beginning of Underpass the title track binds together flute samples and disparate beats before exploding into a complexly syncopated monster with a distinctly latin feel. Showy to the point of being a bit over-the-top, it doesn’t feel like the sort of thing you’d hear in an underpass, but it’s got real moves.

Sayer draws a nice counterpoint, leaving the barest minimum to accompany the frantically shuffling bass. Lean and to the point, it brings nothing more than it needs to kill it. Negative Energy switches the focus to footwork with a repetitive vocal loop to wallpaper the four-to-the-floor house beat, gradually building to the kind of fulsome climax that house music is supposed to. Sly Defender returns to the syncopation and really boils things down to the dubstep essentials: driving bass, rolling high-hats and snapping snares against a subdued synth melody. The EP’s final cut is its least expected; Packed Heat roars with ambient warmth with the hint of a beat to put this in the hypnotic territory of Blanck Mass.

In the past I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of voices in the Australian EDM wilderness, trying to get people to pay attention to names like Cassius Select and Gareth Psaltis. With a few exceptions (looking at you Cedie Janson) I’ve been getting a bit disheartened lately. Apparently all it takes to get me excited again is a few echoes of the sounds of yesterday and this -let’s be honest- near perfect EP. Asdasfr Bawd is so young, he’s got a lot of future to look forward to; with such knowledge deployed with perfect poise, it is a space full of possibility.

- Chris Cobcroft.