★★★★☆
A German tech-house visionary with a knowledge of history (see electro extension “Avoid”), Falko Brocksieper’s mood ripples from grumpy to proper, it’s-all-your-fault irritable, like he’s flipping from A side to B and back over and over, still deciding as to what his favourite chip settings are like a PMSing robot. Even at his most emotion-bearing, FB stays pixellated and AI-centric — “LMFM” is the classic man-fembot love story — yet the mechanics are always fluent and flexible, the synthetics not party to a series of soulless droids.
However sullen, you’ll move to the grimaces of the bass-lead “Outride a Crisis” that can still give everyone a Balearic smile, followed by “Punta Ayampe” specifically going for an Ibizan climax. Acid heir “Hoboken” still somehow has the step and bounce of The Goodmen when it’s quite clear this is no carnival, making you sense each dance floor chug is on a mission to understand more about the human condition. “Reverse Engineering” is a one-track mind seizing control, as with all good techno, with loops to hijack your subliminal, and the ambience of “Become” infiltrates as if it’s a preset function Brocksieper can activate when he overheats. An excellent, compact exhibition of dance floor engineering, and suffice to say it has one of the year’s greatest titles in all the land as well.
File under: The Result, Barker & Baumecker, Dan Curtin