OK, so it’s good that the weathers not so Baltic but did that have to mean a return to rain? I’ve had enough of that this winter. Waterlogged parks meaning even less to do in lockdown. As a cheering antidote to all that here’s Kiskadee with some chipper IDM.
Kiskadee is Jack Chown, a producer and composer based in London. His biog rather sweetly says, “I collect sounds and turn them into bittersweet beats and electronic soundscapes.” And there’s going to be a fair bit of comparison to people like Bonobo, Four Tet and the like in pieces on him. Not unfair either but also not telling the whole story. There’s a lovely attention to detail here and a rare way with offbeat melodies that means it’s no tame copyist at work.
_DOWN is the track and it’s a delight. Despite the annoying use of underscore in the title the clever use of “Your request to being a life cycle has been approved” gives the track a vocal quirkiness to the opening that the music enhances. There are crystalised beats and parping sounds. It’s a rich palette in which all the elements blend together into a single coherent whole. And yet in so doing don’t crowd each other out. It has strangely uplifting air about it. A bit of a ‘I know this is weird but weird is good” Welcome home indeed.
Something warming to start the week. A bit of lofi House from Bergmönch.
Bergmönch claims to have only started in 2020 after purchasing his first vinyl turntables as a quarantine hobby. He’s done well is all I can say. There’s a polished sheen to his tracks and a warming love of early house and disco.
Terminal Ö is the featured tune. The essence of the track he says, “is a reflection on the separation caused by the worldwide pandemic.” There’s a crowd sound at the start with some light tom toms. He says, “I sampled the sounds of a busy airport terminal to reflect on times when crowded spaces and travel were normal.” The track then develops with some early house beats and a super supple bass line that weaves its way sinuously through the crowd. It’s a disco house smoothy happy to trammel lines from disco, to house, to deep house. Lofi in its approach but sophisticated in delivery.
A triple crop for your Sunday morning ambient experience from Five Minutes More, Walter Mmari, and Khaligo.
Five Minutes More is an Italian multi-instrumentalist producer based in Milan. The track is the super chilled Underwater. It’s filled with liquid guitar and the whisper of woodblock beats. Keyboards are set in the far distance to leave the guitar languidly centre-stage. This is music by and for lockdown. It’s extraordinarily well produced for something that aims at a lofi style. All the elements are in perfect balance. The mood is a bit sombre and sober. Such a beautiful track.
South Africa’s Walter Mmari makes a welcome return moving at 299,792,458 meters per second with the Speed of Light. He says of the track, “A little known secret is that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light. With this in mind, the faster we move, the more we do, the more we create, the longer our time on this Earth will be. It’s not the most talented that win any race, it’s the most persistent, disciplined, and the ones with the most grit that are remembered. Put on some speed in everything you do and watch the miracles start happening all around you.”
The track opens like a rapid deceleration with time skidding to a halt. It’s taken forward by some chiming riffs and a doom laden bass piano. There’s chill but this is like chill at the end of the world. It has that sort of apocalyptic vein to it. When your dealing with such fundamentals the beats can afford a softness that leaves them rather sitting on the bench watching the end of the world go by. A two minute Book of Revelations. Properly Biblical.
From the Netherlands comes Khaligo, a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Rotterdam. He says that his work is an “expression of what’s happening around me.” That sort of conceptual approach could be a bit austere and mannered in lesser hands. But this has an organic richness that invites you in to make your own meaing.
The track is Exit Lane and is the last track on his new five track Travelogues EP. Of it he says it is, “about how it feels to be on the road. It’s about the coming back after a long journey, and slowly winding down as you’re driving back to your home.” It’s a rather lovely track pitched somewhere between ambient and IDM. There’s soft synth chords of homeward longing pitted against insect crawling burbling breaks. The track gently throbs with a sort of anticipated yearning. Despite the IDM jitter there’s a central calmness to it that gently inspires. It ends with a gradually swelling set of strings and ascending electric piano to offer ultimate fulfillment.
After week of techno a step back from percussive beats into something a bit more ethereal from Nik Alevizos.
Nik Alevizos was born in Greece then moved to Australia at a young age. His biog says that “his style can be described as “Melodic” and “Emotional”.” And that’s very much what you get on Breathless. It starts off in a beatless fashion with a bit of vocal keening. It’s all very otherworldly. Beats arrive but nothing too hard. It could almost veer into dream house but the beats have enough presence to avoid that. Nonetheless, there’s a continuously dreamy drift to the ascending synths which occupy the foregound. It’s all very sunrise or sunset music. Slack jawed at the beauty of it all.
Let’s end this techno week and blast our way towards the weekend with Forest Little.
Forest Little is from the Netherlands and the track is the box fresh, just released, acid techno frazzle of The Grind. He describes is as, “a 90s dance beat with a touch of acid.” This track has a raw sound. It has that breathless feel of something just completed and played at the club that day. The beats have an insistent buzz about them. Everything piles into everything else. It sounds a glorious mess of a track but it’s much more skilfully constructed than first appears. Hardly the artless track it might otherwise seem. But boy what a superb rush.
Sticking with the techno theme of the week, here’s Alinka with Sunday Morning, on a Thursday.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Alinka’s early childhood included, “reluctantly learning the piano (her mother is a pianist), while trying to convince her parents to let her play the guitar.” She’s now based in Berlin. But her work doesn’t have that dark cool I usually associate with Berlin techno. It owes more to New York and people like Hercules & Love Affair.
That type of sound is present on her Sunday Morning EP. She says of the EP, “it was inspired by my time living in Berlin. It’s a dedication to Berlin’s dance floors and dancers, and the special energy that exists in the city. ‘Sunday Morning’ specifically is an ode to Panorama Bar as it’s my favourite place to play in the world and I’ve had many magical Sunday’s there.”
The track has a bit of magic about it. And more than a little sparkle. It’s techno but of a light and joyous type. It adds a bit of disco to the mix. There is more glitter balls than dark corners in this track. A whirl of classic 80s type house beats and a whistling refrain. A proper lockdown mood lifter – even if the cynic in me says ‘after the rain comes the sun’ has never been to London. After the rain comes grey clouds or more rain. Not this time.
A couple of techno tracks to get you through the middle of the week from 747, and Atom of Soul. What marks them out is their differing approaches to the issue of how you get a lead line in a techno track. Go for rock dyamics in one case and a piano in the other.
Vancouver’s 747 is first up. Ryan Chan is a DJ and producer from Vancouver. Best known for his acidic contributions to Aquaregia, This, his first release in a couple of years, is While My 303 Gently Weeps. It’s a brilliant slice of Berlin, Detroit, and the acid legends. There’s a biiiig focus on the 303 sound that gives it a classic backdrop to the track. This is all dark clubs and techno urban futurism. And when you thought this was all brutality and no subtly, 747 wrong foots you with some dreamy synths with a definite techno trance edge. They occupy the traditional guitar solo space and allow the track to be both insistent and yet float away. Such a skillful track.
To Moscow, Russia for Atom of Soul. He offers little by way of biog except, “Electronic project of soulful intelligent deep atmosphere music in different styles.”
The track is Supernova. It’s as big a beast as the title implies but with a soft centre. The beats are firm and verge in their simplicity on hard techno mores. But the edge is taken off by a one note synth line that promises redemption elsewhere. There’s an interplay between progressive techno and melodic techno that’s left permanently unresolved. That is until the acid lines come in after two minutes and then you assume harder techno is going to win out. Wrong. It’s a piano line that saves the day giving the track an ethereal and spaceward quality.
Time for some acid that takes a classic house twist with Dan1mal.
Dan1mal is Daniel Eschenburg who says he “produces a hard-edged mix of multi-genre influenced rhythms that walk the line between edm, hip hop and pop.” Not sure there’s much of that here. On Back To The Acid we get some acid (duh) but also some classic piano house sounds. Not a combination I’d normally think of but the blend is delivered perfectly.
Back To The Acid starts with a sleazy dark bass line. Which is kind of how you’d want ti to start. Then some hi hats and a greater insistence and pace. The build keeps on building. But then a solid piano house line gets dropped in for that kick of something special. The contrast between the buzzing bass and piano is handled perfectly. The piano is used relatively sparingly which gives that extra kick every time it arrives. A proper club track but so cleverly knitted together that it also works as powerful home listening. Class.
A new snow storm has come to England and it’s Baltic out there. Something equally chilly is Out In The Zone by Alien Mammalian. A frozen techno track.
Retuning after two years Alien Mammalian hasn’t lost that sense of acid electro techno in the meantime. Taken from the Out In The Zone LP, this track is eleven minutes of sparse techno. It has an old school feel without ever becoming lost on the past. It’s a dense, chunky electro techno track with lots of acid to melt your ears. This might claim mammalian origins but there’s nothing organic here. It’s all machine made and machine music. No compromise. And that’s how it should be.
A triple bill of tracks for your Sunday morning with Nicolas Kluzek x bencon, Roberto Pedoto, and American Pika. A few more beats than is usual for a Sunday but still the mood is relaxed. Pour yourself a coffee and settle down.
Nicolas Kluzek x bencon is a collaboration between Paris-born and raised Nicolas Kluzek and Germany’s bencon. The track is Sonnenallee. It’s a trumpet driven track with an oh-so-slow mood. Nothing worth hurrying for vibe. The trumpet lead gives it a classic late 90s chill sensation. Beats crunch around listlessly. Keyboards tinkle whenever they feel like it. A little ethereal background vocal to send it effortlessly stratospheric. It’s an alarmingly lovely track.
And so to Italy’s Roberto Pedoto. He’s got a deep house background and this comes through on this chilled trip hop track. The way the keyboards are used on This Trippy Life have that deep house lushness. The beats are firm enough to stop the track slipping too far into the background. And the trippiness is provided by a lost trumpet awkwardly wandering around the track as keyboard chords try to lull you back to sleep. This is chill as psychedelia. Lovely clever stuff.
As the snow starts to come down let’s drift off with American Pika. I have to admit I thought this was some sort of gamer reference. I was wrong. “American Pika is a small member of the rabbit family that lives in the high mountains of North America. It is also a producer, composer, and mountaineer from Colorado.” The track is US-6 – a reference to a highway near his home town.
US-6 is a mix of strong beats alongside a drifting classical piano sound. And leavened out with all manner of strange electronics. The beats give the track momentum while the electronics have a slack-jawed stop-and-stare quality. It’s an almost unsettling mix of styles saved by the sheer pleasure of the contrast between electronic strangeness and romantic piano.
