Throwing Snow - Shadower
Throwing Snow, known as Ross Tones, first appeared in my web browser after doing a mix for GETME! back in April. His last release, Wallow, a late-night whisper of warped trip hop, featured the vocals of Py and was out on Super (check the video here, directed by Dummy’s photo editor Meg Sharp). He’s remixed Glasser and Gold Panda with a gentle, celestial touch and he also runs his own label, A Future Without. His next offering, 12” Shadower/Sanctum, is the debut release from the newly assembled Sneaker Social Club, a self-diagnoised “Experimental bass label that incorporates Sneaker art and timeless rave inspired bass music”. Spearheaded by Jamie Russell, one of the chaps behind the Maya Jane Coles associated label Hypercolour, and Glass Table, a label responsible for bringing us get-low house from Jimmy Edgar and Soul Clap, Sneaker Social Club takes a 90 degree turn right into the left-field club sound.
A master of layers, Throwing Snow’s eerie spectral top notes of Shadower float just beyond reach of the baseline’s hint of house bounce, caught between the real strobes of the dancefloors and the flashing lights seen only when you shut your eyes. Steel-drums spiral upwards and repeat like an Escher and the unfinishined, stuttering female vocals of “I… I… I…” suspend the track in a stasis of tripped-out otherworldliness.
Directed by Ruairí Dunne, the found footage cuts between early era raves, kitchen dancefloors of house parties, labratories and holiday-makers rattling on about “MDMA crystal pure as fuck”. But Shadower is perhaps less of an all-night high and more of a deeply inhaled lungful of DMT, both track and video leaving you with a brief but utterly transportative sensation of tuning back into a room full of people after a solo trip.
