It’s that mixture of menace and beauty that is one the defining elements of the EP: a cricket-chirp of Apehxian melody is submerged into leagues of sub-bass echo; a dusty jazz break is broken apart and reconstituted as a Sublime Frequencies head-bobber; the tremolo melody of a long forgotten guitar magazine compilation switch and bait with a clipped Björk vocal for a wrenching flamenco-dub that starts dirty and ends up astral.

The Hidden Staircase suggests an alternate history where West-Coast noise isolationists and shattered hippies found solace and inspiration in the Stones Throw bomb shelter; beats and patterns were tightly wound in the studio, and then sun-glazed and psychedelized on the deserted beaches of Big Sur. The Hidden Staircase’s amalgam of psych and hip-hop, urban and rural, hips and head belies a childlike disregard for parts that ‘belong’ together and a deep understanding that all music is rooted in the spark of experimentation and the thrill of the unknown. The record is that rare beast (like the Yeti) which grooves and sticks in the head in subtle and unexpected ways. Bookworm, like Kanye and My Bloody Valentine, understands that ‘pop’, 'hip-hop', and ‘experimental’ are not mutually exclusive, but vital forces pulling at each other: The Hidden Staircase.