Moses Boyd - Dark Matter

The Guardian 80

(Exodus)
He’s known as a jazz stalwart but this album brings Boyd’s nuanced production skills to the fore in artfully spliced, stylish tracks

Drummer Moses Boyd has always been a difficult musician to pin down. Half of the fiercely propulsive free jazz duo Binker and Moses, he was heralded as a poster boy of the London jazz revival when they won a Mobo for best jazz act in 2015. But his first solo offering, 2016’s Rye Lane Shuffle, was a dancefloor-focused 12-inch that was closer to the jazz-inflected house of Theo Parrish than any regular improvised setup.

The Guardian 80

(Exodus)

Moses Boyd is a drummer in the same way Questlove from the Roots is a drummer, which is to say that the twice Mobo-winning 28-year-old Londoner is a producer-composer-collaborator-influencer not bound by the kit surrounding him. A progenitor of the current London jazz scene, Boyd’s official solo debut goes large on cross-pollination – and dancing.

Whereas Boyd’s previous Mobo-winning duo with the saxophonist Binker Golding and his Exodus ensemble remained more or less on-genre, Dark Matter exists very much in the wake of Boyd’s breakout track of 2016, Rye Lane Shuffle (which featured Four Tet and Floating Points on mixes). This is the London hybrid jazz of now – a party-facing electronic record that takes note of Afrobeats, two-step garage and Boyd’s travels in South Africa.