Soft Hands Long Gone’ introduces a striking new talent to the pool with FC Music’s meld of spacious, tumescent sound design and lilting rhythmelodic suss. On six distinctive cuts they adapt cues from prevailing global south grooves with a tingling sort of textural flesh and crafty effervescence that also marked out Princ€ss’ sound from the crowd, but here with a slinkier impetus and swing primed to froth a good ‘floor at the right time. In effect they call to mind the dextrous sleights and glancing chords of Church Andrews & Matt Davies delicacies as much as Plaid’s fluffy ‘90s electronica and even the R&B plies of that killer NZO 12” on DDS, but again with a twist of their own soul and tenderness that lands beautiful gentle on mind and feet.

‘PAL’ initiates with a play of hang drum-like feathered harmonies held back from hippy waft and swept up in a butterfly 2-step, whilst ‘Pomar Fresco’ plucks out thumb piano-like rhythmelody like Plaid on a dembow tip, and the sun-kissed UKG of the title tune recalls Sun Araw and Spencer Clark on a holijob in Ayia Napa. The flipped appears to yield subtle reflections of the A-side in an ‘Auto PAL’ cut recalicbrated closer to Xth Reflexion or Sensate Focus, beside the sloshing dub house exotica mutation ‘Over’, and the tongue-tip thizz of ‘Soft Hands (Totally Gone)’ that leaves a lingering, elusive impression on the mind.