Hieroglyphic Being - Dance Music 4 Bad People - New LP Record 2025 Smalltown Supersound Norway Vinyl - Chicago House / Techno / Experimental

Transcendent Chi house psychedelia by the one and only Jamal Moss aka The Sun God aka Hieroglyphic Being for his debut album with Smalltown Supersound, dovetailing the Oslo label’s prevailing tastes for outré jazz and Actress’s skewed club musick into mind-spanking cosmic bangers.

 

 

A descendent of Sun Ra, Ron Hardy and Adonis; the producer/DJ Jamal Moss embodies an incandescent spirit of Afro-futurist art intended for getting out of one’s self - transcending mind/body limitations and getting closer to the ineffable. Far more than most in his field (at the broadest sense), Jamal’s music achieves its intent thru a distillation of esoteric knowledge into immediate, upfront function, holding tight to its classical forms whilst boldly fucking with convention to produce unique states of delirium and transience. His notions of “synth expressionism” and “rhythmic cubism” are best understood in context by bodies in flight on the ‘floor, but his polychromatic flow of energies equally translate to open minds at home and elsewhere thanks to a ceaseless vitality that is in abundance on ‘Dance Music 4 Bad People’.

 

 

Titled in a playful tradition initiated by a fateful illegal basement party in Manchester (‘Worst DJ in the World Ever’), Jamal’s latest conceptually, instrumentally, dices with dichotomies of good/bad that he has seen thru since his time as a club kid in the ‘80s, when the likes of Chicago’s Medusa’s and Muzic Box were literally places of sanctuary from life on the streets, as he explains; “Back then, especially during the Reagan era and the police brutality of the so-called crime and crack epidemic, the one thing I noticed in my community was that house music actually helped us escape from all that negative stuff and make everybody in the environment support each other more.” That background, as ever, gives context and license, where needed, for the sense of expressive abandon harnessed within his jakbeat discipline.

 

 

In sharp contrast to both pedestrian tech-house and the groove-less simulacra of hypermodernist club music, Jamal taps into something more psychosexual, under-the-skin, and utterly vital, and always with a musical mirth and critical insight that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but does takes it purpose to heart. It’s not hard to hear that at play on every turn from the acidic lather of ‘U R Not Dying U R Just Waking Up’ to the club-swilling closer ‘The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence’, and firmly registered in highlights such as the angular stepper ‘The Secret Teachings of the Ages’, and beatific glyde of ‘Reality is Not What it May Seem’, to the taps-aff and slap the ‘floor gospel-house-psych stunner ‘I’m in a Strange Loop’. One for the big people who don’t sweat the small stuff and need to get dowwwwwn.