This is my first encounter with Robert Hood’s Monobox alias. And it’s great. Hood is, of course, one of the founding fathers of minimal techno, and you can definitely see that here, but it’s quite a bit more banging than, say, Minimal Nation. Resident Advisor call it ‘big room techno’, and I have no reason […]
Tag: genre_techno
I didn’t know it, but I really needed this. There’s something very comforting about tucking into a hefty slab of crunchy Monolake loveliness, and this is 95 minutes of the good stuff. Not that this record doesn’t have it’s surprises. Sure, for much of the time we’re in familiar territory: skittering beats, sci-fi stylings that […]
I don’t buy a lot of 12″s or EPs. Partly, this is because I seem to really like the album as a format — I like the feeling of handing over control of my listening to an artist for an hour or so — but, to be honest, it’s mostly because I have enough trouble […]
Phillip Sollmann throws us a curveball at the start of this album: opener Oh, Lovely Appearance Of Death consists of a sort of ambient wash under an a capella rendition of the (predictably cheerful) Funeral Hymn For A Believer sung by visual and performance artist William T Wiley. It’s simple and affecting and certainly not […]
Well, this is a surprise — and, on reflection, a pretty awesome one. I’ve been a fan of Ellen Allien’s since 2005’s Thrills, and enjoyed hearing her evolution as she combined the accessible and the experimental on 2008’s Sool and especially 2010’s Dust — and even to some extent on 2013’s modern dance soundtrack LIsm although I do have mixed feels […]
It has to be said: if you don’t like listening to someone opening and closing some kind of flangey filtery thing (n.b. perhaps not the correct technical vocab there) then you probably won’t like this record. But then, it also has to be said: if you don’t like listening to someone opening and closing some […]
Apparently, Sheela Rahman has been releasing 12″s for a few years now, but this is my first encounter with her. And a thrilling encounter it is, too. The tracks explore a range of vaguely IDM-ish analogue techno and squelchy Chicago acid sounds (rather disproving my overly-neat thesis about techno LPs going either deep or broad, since […]
Hooray, Monolake is back! And he’s great! Again! Last week I was pontificating (again) about The Nature Of The Techno Album. In contrast to Roman Flügel’s, this is definitely a record which goes deep rather than broad, sticking to one style and refining and exploring and inhabiting it. Well, I suppose you could argue that […]
Being someone who’s keen on a spot of the old repetitive beats, but doesn’t get much, I’ve mused much (and written here probably rather too often) on the curious creature that is the techno album. To make a very crude generalization, there seem to be two popular approaches: pick one sound that works for you […]
Aw, now, this is kind of lovely. It’s techno at its most melodic and hypnotic. The tunes are front and centre of everything here, the beats sitting and the back and just gently propelling things along. In fact, it’s kind of pushing the line between techno and a kind of proggy trancy synth music. The […]
dogrando writes about some records 