Max D: "Flex Cathedral"

Last summer, Andrew Field-Pickering (of D.C. boogie monsters Beautiful Swimmers) DJ’d an afternoon set under his Maxmillion Dunbar alias at PS1‘s annual Warm-Up series. Midway through, four NYC flex dancers (from the Flex is Kings documentary) hopped onstage to bruk-up to Dunbar’s rubber band beats, their street dance maneuvers both gliding and bone-breaking, street mime shapes giving way to epileptic fits and slo-mo Mortal Kombat battles.

It’s uncertain if Max D’s latest track “Flex Cathedral” is a direct homage to the flex movement, but it is no doubt taken with its impossible contortions. Flex dancers can make the most jittery and agonizing of body movements look effortlessly fluid, and Dunbar has a similar sensibility at work. The extreme spacing of brittle synth strings and destabilized hi-hats (which seem to fly in from multiple directions at once like an old Joe Gibbs production) appear to have little linking them, and the sputtering snares make it almost impossible to know where each hit will land. But Dunbar stretches ligaments through the negative space and makes all of the pieces connect. Even the most broken of beats sound solid.

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