Healing Force Project // Nebula Dub Explorations
(Beat Machine)

Antonio Marini hones his maverick sample-heavy style into devastating abstractions of soundsystem forms, making one of his best records to date in the process.

Antonio Marini’s work as Healing Force Project has always possessed a beguiling charm. Chucking him into the ‘singular visionary’ camp feels a little lazy in an era where every artist worth their salt is out on their own to varying degrees. You could say his sample-focused sound is a strange mutation of the trip-hop and illbient era, like a disassociated Mo Wax outlier given a shot of something cosmic. But it really does occupy its own zone, mostly too skewed for the average dancefloor but bristling with spikes of intensity that can make for an unsettled armchair listen. Standout drops on Firecracker, Sun Cat and amenthia all lead you to different mysteries where dislocated free jazz licks plunge into negative space and sprites of desk-wrought distortion cavort over spiralling drums. 

On Nebula Dub Explorations, his third record for notable Italian outsider label Beat Machine, Marini has sharpened the focus of his wayward style. The clue is in the title, as he tips towards dub in a pronounced way. Liberal amounts of delay and reverb have always shaped out the dub-schooled space in Marini’s tunes, but this time he seems to have embraced dub more thematically in his sample palette and stylistic choices. The opening stretches of the album don’t tell as much about sonic departure — even with its half-time thump and dominant bass, album opener ‘Sci-Fi Dread’ still feels like a natural continuation of the Healing Force Project exercise in disorientation. It’s a cloudy, restless patchwork of ruthlessly chopped sonic shards. If you’ve ever found soundsystem solace in the hazy tapestries of Seekers International, you’ll find plenty to love in here. 

Coming on like a messy, punk-edged Rhythm & Sound, ‘We Are Mutants’ and ‘Dub “Psyop” Manual’ finds a more meditative pulse to sink into, but bear in mind meditation is a relative term as Marini continually hassles his components of dissected roots reggae through a myriad of different delay times. 

Things start getting really curious with ‘Open The Doors Of Time And Space’, which behaves like a jazzy D&B monster with the airlock left open, all the elements sucked out into a vacuum while the drummer keeps drumming and the bass keeps warping. At this point it becomes apparent Marini is leaning into some of his influences more explicitly on this record, still refracting them through his prismatic approach but undoubtedly showing his hand more than usual. Dub becomes a byword for all soundsystem music, rendered in brilliant new forms by his misfit hand. 

‘Framing The Native’ is the first true shockout moment of Nebula Dub Explorations, riding a tough dubstep framework carrying a skittering blanket of micro-samples, like Autechre-style systems music applied to a half-time 140 snarler. The forthright pressure continues on ‘Cognitive Breakfare’, where an icy, downtempo lead-in plays a mean foil to flurries of amens that steadily rise in intensity. The notion of linearity is stretched on these tracks, making them still relatively bold choices for a DJ, but there’s impact bedded into the arrangement and mixdown which would quite frankly tear a dance apart. 

Marini spells out his self-awareness on one of the most ‘traditional’ tracks on the album — ‘Muddy Mutant Dub’. It’s got the skanking chops, walking bassline and off-beat rimshots you expect from a classically-informed dub cut, or perhaps in the context of what’s come before it just sounds relatively grounded. Whatever the case, Marini has mastered the art of keeping his wild artistic sensibilities intact while managing to channel them into his most impactful record to date.

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