3 out of 5

Label: Un Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: ?

I bobbed my head to Janski Beeeat’s Game Planet, giggling at all the apropos – given the name and video game references – chiptuneisms and glitchy sound effects, and wondering what the line was: I was definitely enjoying this, but I wasn’t especially hooked on it.

A few banging beats down the road, and a couple of things started to dawn on me: that the core, grimey beat used on these tracks is a rather generic dubstep beat – the sound more than its exact syncopation; exactly the effect that would often end up parodied as dubstep in a post-Skrillex world – and that Game Planet would, with regularity, come back around to this beat as a kind of reflex – it sounds cool, it clearly gets your head bobbing, so go to it.

With this framing, the tracks are pretty limited. Janski (Jean-Sébastien Vermalle) has a ton of fun along the way, but the quirk is very contained to what can be done between set lengths of those beats, making it ultimately fairly predictable, and on rails. When he does take those brief diversions, it’s the best thing ever – the on-a-dime manipulations of gamey sounds are a blast – and thus, when the album strays furthest from its structure, like on Tubex, it serves to trigger interest in how Janski might develop this sound beyond the dubstep era of electronica.