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To introduce the label’s latest signing, self-taught Sheffield multi-instrumentalist, producer and willfully eclectic artist Yarni, NuNorthern Soul founder Phil Cooper offered him the chance to re-shape and re-invigorate tracks from the imprint’s catalogue. The result is NuNorthern Soul Restructured & Reworked by Yarni, a fine four-track EP that deftly showcases his varied musical skills and undoubted production chops.

While he may be a new addition to the NuNorthern Soul roster, with an album in the works for the imprint, Yarni is no newcomer. Since making his debut with the deep house-fired Gloria EP on Redlight Music back in 2014, the Sheffielder has released a wealth of singles and albums, earned a reputation as a dynamite live performer, and earned high-profile support from the late Andrew Weatherall, DJ Harvey, Disco Pogo magazine and fellow son of the Steel City, Luke Una, whose enthusiasm for the artist’s work alerted Phil Cooper to his quality and undoubted potential.

Both these aspects come to the fore on his EP-opening interpretation of Ragz Nordset’s folksy 2013 gem ‘You Started It All’, with Yarni offering up an enticing blend of thickset, dub disco-influenced grooves, raw clipped guitar licks, echoing drum fills, heady sonic textures and – as the track builds towards a breathless conclusion – cascading strings and skittish, pitched-up post-D&B grooves. Like the word of fellow South Yorkshireman Crooked Man, it’s a radical, righteous and genuinely revolutionary revision.

Yarni then moves on to Be.lanuit’s ‘Nana A’Leon’ featuring vocalist Marcos De La Fuente, wrapping a moody and locked-in groove in delay-laden percussion fills, tightly wound guitar riffs, ghostly electronics, slowly unfurling piano motifs and pulsating sequenced bass. The result is a heady, low-slung chugger that will surely find favour with A Love From Outer Space’s Sean Johnston and other ‘dark disco’ enthusiasts.

‘System Junk’, a lesser-known cut by Manchester scene stalwart Neil Diablo under the North of The Island alias, is the next to be re-imagined by Yarni. Opting for an up-tempo triple-time beat, throbbing Italo-disco synths, effects-doused electronics, and snippets of eyes-closed musicality, Yarni offers a few subtle nods to the stretched-out analogue hypnotism of krautrock whilst retaining the picturesque, Balearic-minded sonic beauty and dreamy synth chords of Diablo’s original production.

To round off an inspired EP, Yarni gets his mitts on NAiL’s ‘See a Day’. Lightly speeding up and fattening a bongo-laced hip-hop break, he foregrounds a booming dub disco bassline, twinkling piano loops, gritty guitars, mazy Hammond organ solos and jaunty, sun-splashed elements recycled from the sometime Bent member’s original mix. Like the rest of the EP, the results are genuinely stunning, heavy and delightfully dancefloor ready.




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