Tchami - 'Born Again' / 'Buenos Aires'

In the year 2020, there have come to be two avenues an artist can take in the lead-up to a new release. Some take the route of smoke and mirrors, grand gestures the likes of gaudy marketing campaigns and obnoxious advertisement. Others take a much more subdued approach, simply letting their creative voice helm their campaign by allowing their music to speak for themselves. With the arrival of two stellar new singles following the bar-setting ‘Proud’ and ‘Ghosts’, Parisian genre-creator, label-header and all-round tastemaker Martin Bresso’s opts for the latter, backing up all expectation that his debut full-length record will be anything but a parlour trick.

First of the two is the finger-snapping ‘Born Again’, a creative take by Tchami on the burgeoning tech-house heaters doing the rounds on the front pages of places like Beatport and Hype Machine. Sharing the same philosophy in variations of a 2 bar loop, Bresso takes special care here to incorporate his own signature style, implementing a heavy yet subdued bass line with more weight to it than we’ve come to expect from styles the likes of tech poster children Green Velvet or Hot Since ‘82 and the even bass aficionado Chris Lake. It’s not an entirely new idea, being somewhat reminiscent of past tracks like his Malaa collaboration ‘Deus’ and even the relatively recent ‘Aurra’, but its also a style not found anywhere but Tchami’s own CONFESSION label right now, perhaps the best compliment here one can give.

And last but certainly not least is daresay the most intriguing offering of the two singles, ‘Buenos Aires’. A fitting name just as curious as the direction taken here, the track incorporates for perhaps the first time in the Tchami discography elements of classic genre ‘G-funk’ and it’s contemporary, ‘Future Funk’. Motifs of vocoded vocals and reverb-choked snares soar over more conventionally Tchami future-house bass lines and impeccable if even sometimes excessive application of compression techniques with what all culminates in an incredibly catchy four-minute and twenty outing.

So simple as something like the fact that both tracks contain motifs on repeat every four bars throughout without ever becoming tacky or a nuisance is a testament again to Bresso’s fundamentally strong grasp on writing well-structured pop compositions and subsequently transitioning them into full-blown dance anthems. No doubt it’s one of the traits that inspired one of his biggest collaborations to date with none other than the Mother Monster herself, Lady Gaga, and certainly one cleverly used in keeping us bated with anticipation of an equally gargantuan release later in 2020.