Teakup - Sips Tea

Ohio house producer Teakup has yet to release a lot of music, but the few releases we have heard have all been superb. Happily, he’s also on fine form throughout Sips Tea, his first outing on Brooklyn imprint Homage. He starts in confident mood via the Wurlitzer organ stabs and dense, heavily percussive deep house beats of ‘Buckwheat (The Body Knows)’, before successfully employing ghostly chords, funky synth-bass and smoother beats on ‘Evaporate’. ‘Ice Cream Spork’ is spacey-and-funky and sounds like an early morning classic in the making, while ‘What’ is a breakbeat-driven chunk of light-night wonkiness. ‘This Version’ sees him sneakily add reggae vocal samples to an off-kilter electronic groove, while closing cut ‘Dipthong’ is a decent slab of deep house/tech-house fusion.