Now, this is great stuff. I’ve not heard techno quite like this before. The beats range from dubby to a hard warehouse-style techno. The dominant instrument is the piano: dissonant stabs and abrasive jazzy runs — uplifting Balearic this is not. Occasionally, the beat drops out leaving only dark swirling atmospherics, which I guess is […]
Tag: genre_techno
A few years ago, I would have considered myself quite a Kompakt fan (though I did prefer the more austere Minus). I’ve drifted away from them, a bit, but I do really like this mix CD. It opens with an ambient/neo-classical string track by Danny Norbury, which is obviously going to get me on its […]
As you would expect, Surgeon’s mix for Fabric is highly skilled and inventive. It may be restrained by his standards (there is nothing like the moment in his This Is For You Shits mix on Warp where he drops Whitehouse’s Dumping The Fucking Rubbish), but for Fabric it’s pretty adventurous. It’s mostly good hard techno, with […]
When it was released, this caused something of a stir, being a Raster-Noton record that featured tunes. I mean, it’s not exactly going to get hands in the air down at the Ministry of Sound, but there are definitely catchy moments in Olaf Bender’s bleeps and bloops. Nevertheless, it still has that Raster-Noton feel about […]
I’m generally suspicious of live techno: without that machine-tooled precision, it can end up muddy and uninteresting: you wanted vorsprung durch technik and you got a touch of the Flintstones. And this is very live: there’s a guitarist, and a bassist, and a drummer, and it they are (the sleeve proudly states) recorded without overdubs. The producer […]
Oh boy. When I first read that Alva Noto was making a record with Blixa Bargeld, I was pretty excited. When I heard the first previews, I was very excited: they were breath-taking. And when I finally got the album, well, it was even better than I’d expected. Oh boy. I adore the work of […]
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Robert Hood: Omega (CD, M-Plant, June 2010)
This is the Detroit legend’s imaginary soundtrack for the 1971 movie The Omega Man, a zombie-apocalypse sci-fi job starring Charlton Heston and featuring a hefty Christian subtext. I’ll admit now that I haven’t seen the movie or heard Ron Grainer’s score, so for me the film itself is imaginary. Still, the album holds up very nicely […]
This is kind of frustrating. There’s some really good stuff on this. Nice drum programming, nice rich organic sound, lots of good ideas. But it just doesn’t hang together as an album — it feels more like a showcase of Pulsinger’s range as a producer. This may be something to do with the fact that […]
If you don’t like Monolake (and there are fools out there who don’t, you know) then this probably won’t win you over. If you do, this will do very nicely thank you. Complex, stark, endlessly involving, and atmospheric, this is ultra-minimal headphones techno at it’s best. The thing that struck me most about this, compared […]
There is a lot of variety in this collection of 11 tracks of laid-back minimal. What unifies them is a production style which is detailed, deep, and assured. There’s nothing here that sets my world alight, but every track is superbly put together, and there’s a great warmth to it. I bought this from Boomkat. […]
dogrando writes about some records 