Review
Genre and Mood
Clement Bazin, as Spotify credits him, or Clément Bazin, opens his Night Things EP with Come to This: electronic music with a house pulse and the voice of a steel drum. French Wikipedia notes that his style is often filed under tropical house, while he calls it euphoric; this early track is where that blend begins, melodic and vibrant.
Song Summary
Bazin, speaking to Unidivers in 2018, called Come to This one of the very first tracks in which he worked the steel drum into his music. He started music on that instrument as a child, and a later profile describes his electronic tracks with the steel drum at the front of the mix, tropical textures and touches of soul. The label tagged the EP house music, beatmaking, piano and steel pan.
Musical Breakdown
No source describes this track part by part, so this guide stays with what the sources say about its sound.
Main Section
This is one of the first tracks in which Bazin set the steel drum inside his electronic music, the instrument he would later keep at the front of his mixes. Phonographe heard the EP’s six tracks as very melodic, and Come to This is the first of them.
Outro
At 4:12 it is a compact opener, followed on the record by Aloe.
Concepts in Focus
The label’s house tag points to the house groove, the steady pulse that lets a track sit in a DJ set. Here that pulse meets an acoustic, melodic instrument: the steel drum of Trinidad and Tobago, which Bazin likes to take out of its usual context, set into Paris electronic music.
A groove is how the parts lock together in time. The steel drum is a percussion instrument that plays melodies, so it belongs to both sides of that lock at once, part rhythm, part tune. Compare how FKJ built a groove around instruments he plays himself in FKJ – Lying Together.
Artistic Context
Bazin discovered the steel drum at ten, at a neighbourhood party. He played in orchestras, taught the instrument at the Paris Conservatoire according to French Wikipedia, and toured for years with Woodkid on percussion and steel drum. In the mid-2000s a friend introduced him to West London’s broken beat scene. His first label, With Us Records, advised him to combine the steel drum with electronic music, and Night Things came out there: six tracks released on 18 December 2013, also as a numbered 10-inch vinyl of 300 copies with a silkscreened, handmade cover and a handmade book. He later moved to the Paris label Nowadays Records.
Impact and Reception
Phonographe placed Night Things at the top of the young label’s catalogue. The track is here as the first step of a sound Bazin went on to develop for a decade. Listen for the steel drum.
