The Mask Stays On

SBTRKT doesn’t want you to know his face. The London producer Aaron Jerome built his entire project around that refusal—the African tribal mask, the anonymous presence behind a kit, the voice always belonging to someone else. "Trials of the Past," featuring Sampha, is everything that makes this project work: that particular shade of melancholy UK bass music does better than anyone, Sampha’s voice doing something that shouldn’t be possible over a track this cold, the whole thing feeling like memory compressed into four minutes. There’s grief in the production and grace in the performance, and neither one explains the other.