Available on: Planet E 12″

Paul Woolford’s sound may be increasingly shaped by the UK underground – something his FACT mix and recent work with T. Williams, Appleblim and Altered Natives will attest to – and the way he used rhythm on his biggest track, ‘Erotic Discourse’ (as Bobby Peru) was UK Funky in all but name. But as this new single for Carl Craig’s Planet E proves, few can test Woolford on machine 4/4.

There’s not much going on on ‘Achilles’: an insistent synth melody, cold background ambience and heavily-reverbed shots of drum machine, but it’s all about atmosphere. It’s indubitably a track, designed to be mixed long and steady, but the feeling Woolford creates with so little here is something else: picture classic Phuture tracks lost in the snowy terrains of early grime.

B-Side ‘Razor Burn’, on the other hand, is a more heavily swung affair, with stone bass drums swinging for lighter percussion elements but always catching the wall square-on.

Tam Gunn