Dngdngdng & Prisma - Abisal

The title gives you fair warning. "Abisal" means abyssal in Spanish, and the artwork makes the intent even plainer: a chthonic figure, earthy-skinned and scrawled with hearts and scribbles, as though it emerged fully formed from the planet's molten core. Whatever Dngdngdng and Prisma are making here, it is not music that originates at the surface.

The Peruvian-Argentinian duo first surfaced together on 2022's Pliegues EP for Colombian label TraTraTrax, a release that signalled an interest in high-tension percussive hybrids without quite delivering on the full promise. Abisal, on Prague's Yuku imprint, is where that promise comes good. The divide between programmed and organic sound has been dissolved so thoroughly that you stop trying to locate it; what replaces that distinction is something harder to name, a sense of rhythm as a living, geological force rather than a grid to be filled in.

The polyrhythmic writing here is genuinely advanced. Rhythmic contractions and shapeshifting timbres move through what the record's best passages feel like a maze where every turn reveals a new corridor rather than a dead end. This is a formal property that sounds simple to describe and is extraordinarily difficult to execute: keeping complex cross-rhythms legible enough to feel like forward motion rather than chaos. The closest comparators working this territory are Lechuga Zafiro, Siete Catorce, and the broader network of Latin American producers who have been quietly developing a strain of experimental club music that owes as much to indigenous percussion traditions as it does to European techno.

The atmosphere throughout is dark and carries what The Quietus's reviewer astutely called "a lingering sense of fatality." This is not music built for euphoria. It is music that sits at the bottom of something deep and patient, waiting to see if you can hold your nerve long enough to adjust to the pressure. There are moments of release, but they arrive slowly and feel earned rather than given.

What makes Abisal worth sustained attention is its consistency of world-building. Lesser records in this mode treat rhythmic complexity as the destination; this one treats it as the terrain. By the time you surface, you have the distinct sense of having been somewhere specific and very far down.