Number four will be born to the floor. Melomanic mastermind Vernon Felicty is the freshest residential of the harbour city and we had to trouble up faster then Bonny & Clyde’s motorbike. Here’s what happened… Get ready for a fix of Rotterdam’s danger!
Deadly Population One album from Terrence Dixon on Rush Hour. Under the Population One codename, Detroit citizen Terrence Dixon has realized some of his most vivid, esoteric portals to the Motor City mindset. ‘Theater Of A Confused Mind’ is Dixon’s 2nd album in this mode, twenty years after his debut album, ‘Unknown Black Shapes’, and the ‘Hippnotic Culture’ 2LP, whose ‘Rush Hour’ track inspired the company’s name.
Upfront white label copy with two tight & funky techno movers by Dutch techno legend Sterac aka Steve Rachmad. Official release later this year with new/other tracks and remixes.
Mephisto Frequency Oscillator (MFO) is a dynamic production duo made up of Italians Dario Di Pace and Massimo Di Lena. Here they release their first of a two part EP series, Future City Traffic, on Dutch label Dekmantel having only previously released on Early Sounds Recordings. Across three tracks they lie out some fine space funk and dirty deep house and prove they have a great understanding together.
Baroc launch their imprint with two slices of tough, analogue house and techno from L Neils. Heat treated drums crack and thump underneath layers of ethereal synths and rolling, bubbling basslines.
“Spotlight Diktat” in reference to the feeling some DJs have when they are on tour. A kind of DJ melancholia generated by airplanes, dehumanized hotels, waiting hours in boring terminals, basically traveling alone.
“I made these tracks out of this mood. At first they sounds like the typical groovy dance tracks, but when the melody comes out, you immediately feel there is something wrong… now the track is on and you still dance (of course it’s made for that) but you could almost cry to it too. So this is what happens when a DJ or a producer has to do their job, but they aren’t really in the mood for it. When the party comes, they just forget everything and make the show happen regardless. They have to bear the spotlight diktat and keep on entertaining people regardless of what they have in mind.”
Versatile techno three tracker by CEOL, A moniker adopted by Glasgow’s Dom Cappello and Lee Duncan. Dom’s productions as Hutton Drive have appeared on cult labels like Soma and Frantic Flowers, whilst as half of Harri & Domenic he continues to hold down the residency at Glasgow’s legendary Sub Club. Fellow Glaswegian Lee Duncan records as Leeon and debuted in 2012 on the cult Seventh Sign label. Lee will also return under his solo alias later this year.
Orlando Voorn is back with a new album, on Out-Er. Acid European influences combined to Detroit techno with continuous dance melodies. Orlando Voorn experimental and innovative music strikes again.
New label continuing the Hinode / Science Fiction legacy, quality interstellar Detroit influenced analog jam’s.
UK-based Adam Cummings aka Binny is back with another EP that shows his skills & deep affinity with the Detroit sound, he blew our mind again with his tremendous honest analog sound & brilliant arrangement. This Four tracker contains only floor tracks full of 909 drums, brilliant patterns & groove baselines with the touch of the Juno machine.
The Floorplan project show-cased Robert Hood’s love of gospel-tinged house, but as this, his latest release demonstrates, he remains a techno artist through and through. The Protein Valve record originally appeared on M Plant 20 years ago and like Hood’s Internal Empire and Minimal Nation releases, became a blueprint for minimal techno. On the “Re-Plant” and “Edit 1” versions, nagging, insistent percussion and an eerie organ sound create a sense of drama. However, the old approach proves to be the most effective and the second edit remains closer to the original sound, with jittery hats, unsettling organ riffs and the wind whooshing past in the background.
Nice compilation ep with Clone veterans Duplex and Mark du Mosch alongside Costelloe and ESS. Smooth electro techno sounds coded from Dublin.
Finnish deep house champ Trevor Deep Jr takes a break from releasing for Delsin and his own HPTY imprint to drop this delectable set of jams for Nsyde. There is a distinct dubby lilt to Trevor’s output, and that comes through in abundance with the carefully treated chord that pulses through the core of lead track “Merge”. However that track is still operating in the Basic Channel school of dub, while “Blunted” flips the script to a Rhythm & Sound style romp through rootsy steppers rhythms and choice guitar plucks. “Believe Dub” ramps the energy back up with a housey groove around which cavernous synths can echo and throb, making for a damn fine addition to the tradition of dubwise dance music.
One of the true masters of modern minimalism, and one of the central artists on Figure SPC, Dutch artist Jeroen Search is back. Over three exciting and urgent new tracks Search hones in his skills in programming and arrangement to create yet more exciting and unique club tools. A refined and trippy journey into the cleaner, more funky end of the Techno spectrum, ‘Magnus’ works an airy, bleep-era riff atop snappy, tight drums and frenetic hat and ride elevations. Constantly lifting the energy, dropping it off with subtle tension, and bringing it back again, its a masterful example of the producer’s talents.Drifitng into more edgy zones, the darker and more sinister ‘Renaissance’ welcomes back Jeroen’s jacking house influences, as this groovy 90s-vibed jam takes off. A rough and totally out-there synth riff emerges from the forward pushing percussion to take centre stage, creating a moment of wild abandon!’Formalized’ completes the EP with a more abstract trip into dark dance. Classic techno bleeps and pizzicato synth patterns revolve and hypnotize in this reduced and frankly killer slice of paranoid genius.
Dutch techno legend Steve Rachmad, aka STERAC, joins the Klockworks ranks with an outstanding four-track EP. Funky minimal techno like he did a long time ago on Robert Hood’s M-Plant in an updated version.
Doing their own thing with a host of less-familiar names, Mord has worked tirelessly over the past couple of years to establish a distinct sound within more techno-minded realms. Charlton returns with a second release for the label that brings a range of moods to bear on his looped-up style, kicking off with the Robert Hood-isms of “Vulnerable” with its nervous cyclical chimes, before “Stand Behind A Line” burrows a little deeper into throbbing machine rhythms with acid overtones thrown in for good measure. “Unforgiven” opens things up with a mammoth, distorted square wave synth line that flinches not once in its quest to devastate the dance. “Simple” thing brings some 303 action back into the mix but balances it out with a dense base layer of industrial grunge to make for a nice and dirty ass-shaker.
The 2nd Ep by Kosta Athanassiadis aka XDB on Echocord. The Afrikk Ep contains 3 original tracks, all rough, deep and dubby with house elemenst, typical XDB style. Also the ep contains a remix of the Afrikk track by Philogresz. All tracks are perfect for the dancefloor, a good mix of the modern House sound of today and Dub Techno.
The Hipodrome Of Music 