Sympathies is a series of self-published releases by Furtive, showcasing an extensive catalog of production. The fourth installment has Furtive exploring new ground and re-focusing familiar high-impact approaches, yielding a 9-track release of scintillating drum’n’bass, driving psychedelic techno, and tuff dancefloor weapons.

The steady, driving techno brain-melter of Contre-Jour launches the release, setting the stage with dizzying lost-in-space arpeggiation and progessive, growling bass mutations. [Faltering] Ego Integrity continues wriggling down the wormhole, with dubbed-out psychedelic washes spilling off of warping synth contortions.

With Wicked Threshold, Furtive introduces a new direction: a thoroughly personal take on crepuscular, phantasmic drum’n’bass. With a gauzy melodic cloud, the track snatches the imagination and pulls the body along with it, tumbling through breakbeat atmospherics. Untroubled Moment is a gentle but energetic drum’n’ bass roller, with playful melodics and fuzzy-crunchy textures to lend that wiggly bounce back to relieved-unclenching-comedown sighs. The fluttering, heartfelt Felicity rounds out the drum’n’bass cuts with warm sunset glitters. With powerful low-end energy and heart-tugging sound design, Furtive lends a buoyant gloss to this release with these three tracks.

True to form, Furtive delivers several more uncompromising pedal-mashers. Kinzhal opens with a full-tilt distorted sonic assault, its thrumming bass matching up with venomous, atonal synth licks to make for a proper beatdown of a track with all of its screws turned tight. Voltaic Kisses is a grinding, bubbling, pounding track for awkward, electrified dancefloor exchanges of saliva n’ substances. Vindicator sweeps the floor with seething, serrated sound design - an unrelenting, cranked-up weapon for frothing dancefloors.

Furtive closes the album out with an atmospheric curveball: Digital Detritus is a wistful, plaintive reverie about the weird, touching, heavy, and often unexpected debris discovered in forgotten folders on nearly-lost USB sticks, fizzled hard drives, and almost-disabled accounts - a love note to finding unedited photos and breakup letters in digital hidey-holes almost lost to data oblivion, draft boxes, and/or faulty memory. Furtive weaves a moving soundscape with a yearning keyboard melody and lush, emotive sound design, tapping into the dissociated poignancy of sad boys/drain/internet aesthetics via whitearmor and Yung Sherman, as well as with a backward glance at Furtive’s long-ago experimental metal/witch house crossover project, Lavender Colored Life.

Sympathies is named after a series of portraits, experimental photographs, and weird VHS footage incidentally produced together with Furtive’s dear friend Mycie during a wild, debauched studio session.

Sympathies is a blur of emotions, experiences, sensations, relationships, and the psychedelic fragments between.