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Music

rAHHH’s Debut EP Is Club Music With Its Head in the Clouds

‘Ones,’ the UK musician’s first release on grime producer Mr. Mitch’s Gobstopper label, is a dreamy vision of the dancefloor.

It is a bit of a letdown to discover that the producer rAHHH is based in London—if only because I'd always assumed he'd floated somewhere above the Earth's surface. Earlier this year, I first encountered his music on a mix by the experimentalists in Swing Ting. Sandwiched between bubbly edits of pop-rap, jittery club music, and the Manchester duo's own prismatic dancehall productions was a breathless and woozy reprieve from the mix's constant forward momentum. It was a track made of club music tropes—warped steel drum melodies, woozy synthesizers, twitchy martial snare work—but it sorta just billowed in the wind, a breath and a pause amidst the chaos.

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It was only a snippet, but it was striking, so I consulted the tracklist and headed off to the Soundcloud page for rAHHH only to find…not all that much. There were a few productions and remixes that suggested a similar sort of airiness, but there were no official releases and no identifying information, as if the producer themselves were as much of a mystic vapor as the track that introduced me to them.

Turns out though, rAHHH is just a person from London named Louis, who enjoys "reading good books in quiet pubs." Or at least that's the dating-show-esque description that he gives me when I reach him via email. On October 20, he's set to emerge from the shadows a bit more with Ones a proper debut release on Mr. Mitch's Gobstopper label. The five tracks, like the one that appeared on the Swing Ting mix, are misty takes on dance music. "Dog Days" twists a micro-vocal sample to sound like a children's choir over a kicked-back drum program. "Lexus Riddim" plays with dancehall naming conventions, but its acoustic guitar meanderings and openhearted synth work feels as winningly harmonious as International Feel's nods to balearic or any of Four Tet's recent sunrise mantras. There was a genre of electronic music that people tried to call weightless a few years ago, but Ones really earns that descriptor more than anyone else—its club music as it might play in Cloud City.

"The EP is an ode to the sun," Louis says when I ask him about the lightness of the music. "It's a cat curled up on the bonnet of a car, basking in the sun—warmth and comfort."

That sense has run through all his music to date, but he says it isn't even necessarily by design. "It's something unconscious, a lot of the songs I make and songs I'm drawn to have a bright complexion, the higher pitches, a lack of dissonance," He explains. "It just feels natural to end up with those elements. As much as I try to make something dark it will generally come out stilted and awkward."

It's a sound that has predecessors, but feels uniquely airy and comforting. He's freed from the burdens of traditional electronic tropes, able to float somewhere above it all. "I've been making music on and off since [2009], going through a few aliases," Louis says. "For now, I feel like I've reached a musical resting point in rAHHH. It feels like home."

Listen to Ones here in advance of its release October 20 on Gobstopper.