Proxima begins the launch of his debut album ‘Alpha’ with the release of ‘Trapped’, a lean halfstep monolith that ranks as one of his toughest and most minimal tracks so far, and which has been a deadly fixture in the arsenal of the scenes leading DJ’s in recent months. Released two weeks after Trapped, ‘Alpha’ follows on from a string of blistering singles for Tempa, which found the Dutch producer carving out a stark and synthetic vision of 140bpm club music. Alpha gathers Proxima’s most fully realised music to date - widescreen in sound but packing intense sound system force. Next to the tinny grind that’s characterised some of dubstep’s harder side in recent years, its tracks are rendered in full 3D, with percussion lines moving in snakelike coils around firestorm distortion, and icepick melodies that cut sharply into the foreground. Its self-contained vision and frosty evocations of deep space recall the interstellar techno voyages of Detroit pioneers like Jeff Mills, Dopplereffekt and DJ Stringray. While its rhythmic intricacy and steely poise recall both Shogun Audio’s wiry funk and the machine soul of dBridge and Exit Records.