[ad_1]
“At first, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.” Final August, that iconic line from Rhythm Controll’s oft-sampled 1987 basic “My Home” was the opening salvo to Skee Masks’s back-to-back set with Rotterdam DJ Stranger at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Pageant. The echoing proclamation served because the setup for a stuck-in-reverse hardgroove loop that appeared to tear open a gap in space-time, sucking in all these inside earshot of the UFO II stage. Contained in the rift, Skee Masks and Stranger dished out a barrage of basic techno from the likes of Ben Sims, Jeff Mills, and Joey Beltram.
It was an surprising stylistic shift from Skee Masks, actual identify Bryan Müller, who’s greatest recognized for cobbling collectively unpredictable damaged rhythms from numerous bass- and breakbeats-heavy genres. On ISS010, the tenth EP from Ilian Tape’s Ilian Skee Sequence, he makes his most in depth foray but into techno. From begin to end, the document runs on bouncy, tightly looped four-on-the-floor grooves that pump like greased-up pistons. However don’t mistake their repetition for monotony; if the pounding kicks are Müller’s sturdy chassis, then the peripherals are his hissing hydraulics, heat neon underglow, and spinning rims.
On “Matchpoint,” the repetitive bassline could induce delicate tunnel imaginative and prescient, however Müller’s amorphous percussion is the star of the present. He cycles via an unhinged carousel of various hi-hats, switching up patterns and repeatedly tweaking delays, echoes, filters, and slippery reverse results. The next observe, “Double Normal,” places equally dubby synths to extra aquatic ends, swirling them round a chugging monolith of a groove. The best way that Müller slaps in several percussive components with an audible thwap brings to thoughts Jeff Mills, whom Müller has greater than as soon as posted about on X (previously Twitter), making an attempt to ID a long-lost observe from a 1995 DJ set at Germany’s Slam Membership. Mills is a maestro behind the decks, commanding the gear to do his bidding, and Müller suggests the same assuredness within the studio, tinkering away in what seems like an invincible circulate state.
“Stomp” is the place Müller applies the blissful synth and pad work from Compro to his new techno experiments. Easing off the accelerator a bit, he introduces the primary breakbeat of the EP. For a second, inflexible techno and breaks rhythms scrape in opposition to one another earlier than Müller welds them along with a synth swell that glows white sizzling. Simply after they really feel like they’re going to return aside, he fires off one other arc, with melodic sparks flying off into the gap. Earlier than the observe ends, Müller indulges in a little bit of IDM deconstruction that additional bridges the hole between ISS010 and his earlier work, if just for a second. The callback is a welcome reprieve from a hardgroove-leaning onslaught.
[ad_2]