It’s always refreshing when a piece of music starts somewhere that’s not exactly promising, and then proceeds, along its runtime, to win you over and eventually leave a mark in your mind when it ends.
Flatfoot Sam is Jon Hannan, a Southampton native who has been in the business since the late 90s. The business is making experimental and electronic music in the vein of The Prodigy and Massive Attack. This amount of time sure means a lot of experience, and it shows.
This song, titled Boathouse, is intended as a single off of Hannan’s album that’s in the making. It’s a deep, chill, and driving tune with a ton of color and character. Flatfoot Sam calls this music “Tripfield”, saying it falls somewhere between trip-hop and leftfield.
The song is expertly produced, driving with throbbing bass lines and melodic synths. Generally airy in nature, saturated with pads the song creates a vibe of soaring in speed above the clouds, and while it starts in a docile way, featuring what sounds like a cliched chord progression, it quickly introduces a number of really interesting elements that easily elevate it past the realm of cliche. A major element of those is the vocals. Two separate lines, a female that sings in what sounds like Indian to my ear, and a male voice that sings in what sounds like an African language, both of them are gently processed and altered in a tasty way that makes them float above their surroundings and generally sound very intriguing and catchy.
A craftsman is someone who’s able to make something extraordinary from ordinary materials, and on this song Flatfoot Sam takes a cliche progression, a number of frequently used synth sounds, and a familiar breakbeat with an equally familiar bass line and blends them together to create something that’s truly intriguing, unique, and fun.