The Paradox (Jeff Mills & Jean-Phi Dary) - Counter Active (2021) [Hi-Res]

Reprising their musical relationship after contributing keys and drum machine to the late, great Tony Allen’s ‘Tomorrow Comes The Harvest’ session in 2018, French Guyanese player Dary drapes silky chords over Mills lissom drum programming in six svelte, spontaneous jams focussed on achieving a “higher level of spiritual consciousness” through their creative freedom.

Call it deep jazz techno or techno-fusion, either way it’s just deep as fuck, bringing Dary’s decades of experience playing with everyone from Allen to Papa Wemba, Peter Gabriel and Phoenix in the colourfully harmonised keys, to some of Mills’ slinkiest patterning, with standouts in the hunched hustle and chromatic bursts of ‘The X Factor’, and with the swingeing depths of ‘Twilight’, where Mills’ machine drums appear to resemble the tight-but-loose, grubbing suss of live Afrobeat or jazz drums.