Pig & Dan’s room-rattling tech house is monstrous. Their 2007 Imagine LP for Cocoon is both florid and muscular, with brawny bass grooves that drive tracks like “Globetrotter” and dramatic, spraying synths like those wrapping around “Sly Detector”. Following their well-received Terminate single that dropped earlier this year, the Spain-based duo is long on frayed buildups on The Heat EP, again connecting dancefloor soundtracking to artful, exceedingly rich payoffs.
“The Heat” is flush with gurgling activity, but it’s the more skeletal of this couplet. Its pinging synths barely breach the patter of kicks and splintered bass arrangement, and the entrance of flat, faux strings actually never really manages to create an air of cheesiness, even though one might expect such a thing. “Cubes” doesn’t take very long to get going. While it doesn’t really grow as delirious with counter-tones as “Terminate” does, the simple melody framing “Cubes” is similar to that of the former, and is also first introduced in slick, rubbery bass shots before the scope of how much bigger this track is than its A-side really takes hold. By its end, after a sullen break that reveals the early jolts as having developed a gritty, distorted shell in afterburn mode, “Cubes” slinks away. There’s a faded loop that’s playful enough to be mistaken for a child’s music box, and no semblance of the track’s massive middle section can be found. The Heat EP is tempered better than a few of those borderline big-room trance moments on Imagine are, but even in just two tracks, the duo still packs in a fairly sizable experience.