Billa Bronx's New Single Shows the Euphoric Potential of Drum and Bass

As breakbeats barrel their way back into the popular consciousness of electronic music, they're adapting to many purposes. In the past couple of years, I've heard high-speed drum samples used as the slippery underpinning for weepy ambient songs, as Proustian madeleines for jungle nostalgists, and even as the brutal backbone for hard-nosed EDM drops. It's a malleable form, but the producer Billa Bronx (the so-called "mask" of Astro Nautico co-owner Bennett Kuhn) has adopted it instead for one of its original purposes: unrestrained euphoria.

Utilizing hardware synthesizers, a loop pedal, and a breakbeat editing software from the around the turn of the millennium Kuhn's approach to drum and bass tropes is rough hewn, handmade feeling—worn and comforting like an old quilt from a loved one. His debut EP, Father Forgive was released last year, but recorded in 2012, three years after the death of his father and months before he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It's intended as a document of mourning, and per his Bandcamp, a call to "consider what role our emotional extremes play in the overall course of our health." But the effect of listening to the high speed breaks and uplifting chords is undoubtedly salutary, a lifeline in the midst of troubled times. Its closing track was titled "You Are Not Alone," and its sound was suggestive of that message—his take on the sound is warm and inviting.

Today Kuhn is sharing "Lithium," a track recorded in the same sessions as Father Forgive, which pushes even further into the ecstatic realms the EP hinted at. Swooning strings and blissful monotonic synth lines drift and twirl around one another, like cartoon birds singing to one another as a Disney protagonist slowly wakes. The breaks interrupt the bliss, but only briefly. As the rhythms lock in and become more familiar there's a joy in them too; there's peace in somewhere in the chaos, always. Appropriately, Kuhn's dedicated the song to the organizers he works with at Creative Resilience Collective, a health justice and design group based in Philadelphia.

"Lithium" is out today and its available over on Bandcamp, both digitally and as a package with a screen printed t-shirt. Stream it up above.