4 out of 5

Label: Rephlex

Produced by: Andy Jenkinson

Released as a pretty quick followup to Volume One for Rephlex, Ceephax’s Volume Two is the club-minded pair to its squirrely precedent, featuring organic mixes and steady dance-floor throbs that are delivered from (presumably) classic tech, its frayed edges bleeding through to long-running workouts like Vulcan Venture, or softer beat taps like Ice Rink Acid.

Andy Jenkinson’s journeys as Ceephax are steady but varied: whereas many of his contemporaries tend to go through approximate eras, Andy belongs more to the DMX Krew approach: with his general style established – a preference for 80s retro sounds and materials; leaning on heavy acid beats – Jenkinson cycles between silly and serious fare, tweaking how danceable each variant is; albums can deliver slices of each permutation, and often I find the quality of an individual release is down to there being some consistency in the particular permutations selected…

Which is why (with that bauble of words now exploded) Volume Two is such a solid offering, especially as a Volume One followup: that release had a compilation vibe, and erred towards Andy’s playful tomfoolery, to a somewhat deleterious extent – like he’s just kinda playing around with the drum machine for a bit. It’s really not as loose as that sounds (the album is a ton of fun!), but songs maybe lose the thread. While some moments on this edition have the opposite problem of going a bit too linear – the aforementioned Vulcan becomes kind of unrecognizably generic as it goes on; like a greatest hits of acid club themes – the vast majority of it is top tier acid house, and it is just so gloriously raw, with a very “live” sound of Andy transitioning between BPMs, a la mixing records together.

Between the two volumes is a really comprehensive picture of every Andy does so well. Taken on their own, though, Volume Two is a much cleaner picture: it listens like an intended end-to-end project, transitioning from steady-state, classic Rephlex 90s acid (think Aphex’s appropriately named Classics-era stuff) to club-rocking beats, to a slightly more chilled and ambient touched cooldown.