Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: Markus Suckut / ‘DNA’ (Figure)

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Markus Suckut DNA

★★★☆☆

From Deutschland to Detroit: the most stubborn of straight-line techno doing kick drum kinetics and mapping out the blackest of bleakness. Sectioned off by a combination of industrial padlocks and do-not-cross police tape, once the lights are shut off and the generators flicked on, it’s a bruising ordeal for the fittest and their survival instincts. Synth pulses and heartbeats jump off speaker cones and out of chests, whip cracks sound far away yet have an infinite length of lash, and the pullback of a distressed violin on “Shatter” is the sort of micro-instrumentalism that Suckut uses as piercing weaponry. Even the more reflective “Places” is trying to look at its reflection from behind broken sunglasses in murky trails.

Respite on “Doomed” sounds oddly, overtly triumphant, like the emperor stretching in the morning sun with the task of picking new clothes laid before him. But the grindstone and coalface waits for no man, and it’s quickly back into slippery blips and bleeps over darkened blows and hi-hats shaking into cane-flexing infinity…or just darkened, skin-scraping drums wearing steel toecaps (“Vibrant”), where cruel ritual is the king’s keeper. It’s something when the warehouse ball bearings set to a plinking motion on “Remains” are a lessening of the burden; but of course, ball bearings still hurt if you don’t manage to duck and cover, as Suckut tightens the straps on his techno straitjacket as Detroit’s next avenger.

File under: Subjected, Violetshaped, Oscar Mulero

Album Review: Juan Atkins & Moritz von Oswald / ‘Borderland’ (Tresor)

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borderland moritz von oswald juan atkins

★★★☆☆

Ordinarily a collaboration of this size is all in the mind of messageboard spectators clamouring for an infallible merger. However, Borderland providing tantalization — deep, steady, mildly futuristic as a ponderous probe – will have them racing straight back to their keyboards, asking questions as to whether they’re fully getting the benefits of the duo’s expertise.

Moving effortlessly to amiable flecks and pulses documenting nature and up-down bass of an infinite lifespan, it’s an immersive eiderdown of house and techno milieu. On some level it is faceless; yet the anonymity it does profile sustains a restful ease, massaging controls, resisting urging them on as the jackhammers and pistons are told to fall back. “Footprints,” prominent through its super-clipped hi-hats, is the extent of deviation, save for when the beats drop out in suspended wonder.

The two shape eight tracks from a ball of astro clay that yields the softly, surreptitiously scientific, faintly luminescent (some may say with an aquatic serenity) and of melodies making you take a vow of silence. As it cleanses the dancefloor with little more than a nudge, it edges to the verge of buttery until it threatens to bloat. “Digital Forest” at least throws a mite more fuel on the fire, and “Afterlude” leaves a haunting, timely/too little too late reminder that actually they haven’t been resting on their laurels with a super-minimal fractal dissection. Holding back, or entering a new dimension? Their collaborative B&C games remain better than the A-games of most, but will that be sufficient compensation for ardent techno evangelists?

File under: Basic Channel, Cybotron, DeepChord

Album Review: Airhead / ‘For Years’ (R&S)

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Airhead For Years

★★★☆☆

Mention that Airhead is a close alumni of James Blake, and you’ll think there’s an instant recipe for success already laid bare. After the opening track, the unsteady, woolly and rock-bugged electronica of “Wait” looking to pebbledash folk textures with a spirit in dilapidation, you’re confident that you’ve got Rob McAndrews’ number. Neither scenarios are as home and hosed as that. Airhead puts his brains to dried trip hop, shoegaze and post-dubstep splinters that lead categorisers a merry (well, not quite) dance.

“Milkola Bottle,” for example, flits mischievously yet wears lead weights around its ankles, and “Pyramid Lakes” scissors through a dub/rave spin cycle to tie your headphones wires into an unfathomable knot, duly loosened by slim houser, the up to the minute “Fault Line.” “Azure Race” finds electro calm having tunnelled through the overcast, symptomatic of the album having a solid song structure with juts and overhangs interfering with its perpendiculars. With Airhead’s own admission of being a manipulator when it comes to emotional activation, “Autumn” is almost disconcertingly elfin despite being crowded out with sun-blocking slabs of beats.

All the while the full extent of electronica heads down blind alleys before slowly swivelling into coherency and what’s on-trend emerges from greyscale outlines, wading through drones of feedback to find a central sweet spot on sagging shoulders.

File under: Darkstar, Mano Le Tough, Harmonimix

Album Review: Dfalt / ‘Helsinki Beat Tape Part One’ (Daylight Curfew)

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Helsinki Beat Tape Part One

★★★★☆

Dfalt reaches well-worn crossroads when it comes to the aims of instrumental hip-hop; not quite a trip, not quite a get-down, the commitment to creative drum-fixed thinking that some may call old-fashioned (given that none of it is synthesized or bent from leftfield), is Jason Drake warming the neck muscles so they’re prepared to collaborate with walking feet.

Part one of an LA triple header, Dfalt as hiker only occasionally peers out from under his brim, a stone rolling to the beat of the prairie. If the scenery is nothing to write home about, there’ll always be the drums that weigh a “Feather Ton”, and when pianos cascade on “Spctrpn,” flashbacks to the bright lights and big city are perhaps what Dfalt has left behind in his solo pursuit of unearthing the perfect beat.

“Never Faded Away” travels as far as his dusted boots will take him. Usually with spirit concealed in his step, “Dance of the Witch” is the first instance of Dfalt feeling trapped by the boom-bap of his surroundings, akin to the wrong side of the tracks meeting his gaze. Positivity dissolving, loneliness ascending, “Again the Night” is splashed with icy reality, strings resembling icicles, and while “San Francisco” comes straight up, it’s touched with a window to the soul appraisal. A B-boy stance equidistant from rolling out the lino and curling up with your headphones.

File under: The Last Skeptik, DJ Day, DJ Scientist