Three years after his last full-length album on Delsin, tireless techno producer Mike Dehnert is back with another one. The 104th release on Delsin, entitled Lichtbedingt, counts 12 tracks and is yet another subtle evolution away from the chord driven, functional sound he has championed before now. The album starts off with a suitably sombre intro that features cold, slowly shifting synths. They set an uneasy and moody tone before ‘Construction’ settles into a fat, swaggering. From there you get lost in broken, ruptured, malfunctioning bits of hardware that spit out random hi hats, bleeps and gurgles and then eventually get spat out the other side into a cantering bit of dubwise techno with paranoid vocal snippets. Moving along, the album throws plenty of diverse influences into the mix: ‘Movement’ is freaky and dynamic, skipping and pumping, ducking and diving through all sorts of occult synth sounds and shadowy vocal loops then ‘Single Action’ is like a sledge hammer groove run through with harmonic elements that glint and glisten like diamonds in the rough. Classic sounding Dehnert tracks like ‘ReRe’ remind us where this producer has come from, whilst the breezy house swagger of ‘Emlo’ show us where he might be headed. Key to this album and Dehnert’s output as a whole is, besides the killer grooves, the production: crisp and clean, full blooded and always outstanding, it makes his tracks leap out of the speakers and into minds, bodies and souls without relying on the usual tropes or same old cheap tricks.

listen