Hyperspecific: Electronic Music for February Reviewed by Jaša Bužinel

Tatiana Triplin’s Tone Glow interview nicely illustrates the origins of her sensibilities as a small town US artist. A voracious consumer of the electronic canon along with obscure post-vaporwave offerings and other oddities, more than clubbing it was her obsession with Soundcloud and the blogosphere that informed her “post-internet” aesthetic. She has been persistently putting out weird outsider music under various aliases before Planet Mu picked her up. Her 2023 big label debut echoed the music of Rezzett, but instead of jungle it was lo fi footwork and juke. Triplin has that ‘perfect loop’ approach to production, with a lot going on in the heavily manipulated melodic and vocal samples, some of them even imbued with political statements. She builds her tracks around a single idea, never overcooking it and putting self-expression before technicality. The sophomore, a crème de la crème of the hundreds of projects she has amassed since she started messing around with Fruity Loops as a teen, feels rather more eclectic  – like a dreamt-up vision of millennial club music for a music box. It is not a pursuit of weirdness as much as of beauty through a leftfield lens, finding consolation in saturated textures and gauzy melodies. 

Zotasphere’s perculiar sonic character immediately strikes you as something fresh and exciting. A collection of  soothing, heavy-lidded “avant garde dubs” that embalm you like a plush blanket. The duo, consisting of Ugnė Vyliaudaite and Marija Rasa Kudabaite, two Lithuanian musicians and sound artists from Brussels, hark back to dubby house experiments of 90s Bristol and  after-rave ambience, but expand the sound through electroacoustic Fourth World explorations and esoteric Balearic vibes – as if Jon Hassell, Smith & Mighty and Coil joined forces behind the mixing deck. The arrangements are impressively intricate, employing a rich sample library, woozy synths and a violin that transcends its original function. As alumni of the Institute Of Sonology in The Hague, they translate sounds into sophisticated layers of textures and pillowy tones with trippy undertones. The relaxing piece ‘Xmas Rec’ is a throwback to time spent in the womb, and the acidic slowburner ‘I Contain Multitudes’ recalls past psychedelic reveleries. Despite the strong emphasis on deep groove pressure, this piece of oddball bass music is catered for the chillroom trippers and afterparty dreamers. 

One for the breakcore crew! Maybe even for fans of technical death metal, for they both revel in intensity and complexity. Whodfkisxhlunt is, for want of a better word, very metal-like, full off scientifically dissected breaks, noise explosions, crunched out frequencies, dizzying vocal chops, retro synth stabs, gabber kicks and neurofunked junglism, all compressed into a 17-minute sonic assault. XHL Unit’s genre tropes may be ghosts of the past, yet he is not tinkering with nostalgia. The production is unapologetically maximalist, swiftly avoiding any association with more uninspired tributes to this era, found scattered all over Bandcamp. His aesthetic is expectedly violent and all-consuming, as it should be. The metallic percussion palettes and acerbic frequencies occasionally make the listening experience feel like a lobotomy. Yet the Roman producer and sound designer also finds room for funkier and more blissful moments, as in the second half of opener ‘Combobreaker’. The other standout track, ‘Jungle 1’, featuring Italian industrial legend Luciano Lamanna, alias Virus Voice, wouldn’t be out of place on a Dillinja release. If you are an old school raver, junglist or Warp fanatic who lived through the 90s, chances are you will be triggered… in a positive way.  

For a brief time in the 2010s being cryptic was deemed rad, but the dumbing down of dance music culture has taken its toll on the poets among us. Longtime fans of Larry McCarthy aka Bruce will know him first and foremost as a lyrical soul, who also happens to be an innovative producer and music buff familiar with weirdos such as the Slovenian avant garde composer Vinko Globokar. Following his shift into Scott Walker mode, the release of his moving avant pop debut and the launch of the Poorly Knit label, the Bristolian opened a new chapter in his career. In the past year, he fully transitioned into more esoteric UK techno realms, as his fourth EP gorgeously reflects, particularly the haunting female vocals and ritualistic drums of It ‘Ain’t Over Till…’. The industrial-esque, electric guitar heavy tune ‘Wesley’s Sniped All Our Bleedin’ K (Re-Vamped)’ has been tailored for a signature sluggish Vladimir Ivković set, while ‘Rockfall’ has that Timedance quality. Apart from being dexterous production tools, Bruce is also a vivid storyteller, notably in the atmospheric 10-minute epic ‘You Were Right’, a deep techno beaut for the wee hours. Not to mention the four remixes by Untold, FKA Boursin, Re:ni and DJ_2button, all gems on their own.

Breakbeat’s not dead! Oslo’s young DJ Sprinter has been keeping his head low, consistently putting out solid productions on his Bandcamp, and in just a year and a half has managed to leave a great impression with a string of quality releases, including multiple singles, EPs (the attention-grabbing DJ Sprinter Vol.2) and even a powerful UKG edit of The Bug’s cult banger ‘Skeng’. If breaks are your thing, his tracks will definitely be a head-turner. DJ Sprinter’s style is a relatively orthodox fusion of drumwork with an almost acoustic patina, earth-shaking bassbins pressure and wistful atmospherics – indeed a time-tested combination that can do wonders in the club. Both ‘Air’ and ‘Subby’ are marvelous breakbeat floaters, useful both as transitional tools and tension-builders as well as triggers for emotional release. There is nothing palpably transgressive about his approach, but this is exactly why his tracks have a timeless quality in the Skee Mask sense (who also has a stunning new EP out). You know, a ‘one foot on the shoulder of giants  and the other beyond the horizon’ kind of thing. 

This filthy EP makes me feel like the Green Goblin riding my glider and throwing Pumpkin Bombs on New York City. There is something unhinged, even evil in the way the two Frenchmen manipulate voices and lysergic synthlines. ‘Sub Optik’, a sonic freight train that harnesses the propulsiveness of psytrance through low end pressure, will make your head spin. And with its constant barrage of hallucinatory frequencies, the title track is the equivalent of an astral travel out-of-body experience. ‘E Overload’, on the other hand, is pretty much self-explenatory, with its breakneck breaks and rolling bass. Let the E do the talking! Siu Mata and Croixrouge have delivered club tracks for mischievous creatures that only half remember their human origins as they dance their asses off at peak time. We tend to associate the Wajang label with speed dembow innovations, but this EP seems to stray further away from their Latin American influences towards India’s west coast. If you could isolate the DNA of Goa trance and combine its genetic material with that of 90s darkstep and the post-pandemic strains of bass music, you’d probably get a chimeric sequence called Endless Motion. 

A solitary figure of the Dutch DIY tape scene, Velthuys was a complex human being with a tragic backstory; flower power hedonism changed him forever. In the 80s, he set up a studio in his mother’s apartment, creating hours of poignant synth and ambient music in his secluded room. A reissue campaign led by Light in the Attic and Stroom in recent years has provided an insight into the unique inner sanctum of this man, who once supposedly told a friend he has two souls in his chest. For him, the home studio was a vessel to translate his own fractured reality into music that feels almost impossibly charming – nocturnal synth-driven arabesques with wistful melodies and guitar licks that drift like a drowsy stream, finding balance between melancholy and hope a la Badalamenti. Some songs unravel like an 80s take on Debussy and Satie’s piano pieces, others like psychedelic 50s library music, nods to Brian Eno and as precursors to Boards Of Canada’s synthscapes. Velthuys’ minimalistic compositions are driven by instinctive self-expression rather than premeditated ideas. As with his other reissues, this album compiled by Hessel Veldman evokes a sense that this music was not meant for us to listen to, his songs too fragile, too sublime. 

We could use a lot of wordy fluff and still not say anything substantial about Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s output. It’s hard not to put it in mystical terms, or even throw around the word genius like Jacob Collier fans tend to do. The experience of this album sometimes resembles a purifying noise bath, a baptism through distortion, if you wish. Their distortion has the effect of being submerged in a spring with crystalline glacier water, leaving you recharged. But at the end of the day, it is simply emotional guitar music with a singular atmosphere and a sincere celebration of indigenous Andean culture through unusual means. While not geared for the club, this is unequivocally festival music. The album title comes from an Andean ceremony celebrating the reawakening of Mother Earth, the victory of light over darkness. A spiritual successor to Los Thuntanaka’s self-titled album, Anata puts forth seven gorgeous guitar compositions that move swiftly between psychedelic Andean folk motifs, shoegaze-indebted walls of sound and delicate melodic flourishes in the Durutti Column vein. It manages to elevate the electric guitar into something peculiar and otherworldly, as if time-stretched grindcore riffs had been mutated into power ambient soundscapes with occasional passages of folk percussion. Instead of seeking solace in silence, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton finds it in distortion.

What if techno and grime were invented by chance in the labs of the Groupe De Recherches De Musique Concrète in the late 50s? On his latest, and from what I understand final, album, the Italian producer Dario Picchi adheres to loop-based production and “radical minimalism for soundsystems.” CU is a studious ode to faux simplicity, gradual evolution and mind-bending repetition, as if he wanted to provide the final answer to the question of how many elements you can discard and still consider something techno. His concept is somewhat cerebral and the music a bit inaccessible for the big room techno crowd, but fear not! This is not academic techno. You will find enough examples of high intensity body music for the dancefloor that capture the genre’s essence. For example tracks like ‘CU7’, with its rolling dubstep-indebted subs, ‘CU3’, bursting with kickdrum gusts, and the polyrhythmic kicks and bleeps of ‘CU9’. You also savour plentiful armchair goodies. ‘CU12’ and ‘CU2’ recall the arcane electronic soundscapes of the French pioneers, while the anxiety-inducing ‘CU10’ brings to mind the image of an assembly line with humanoid robots. Even if such music is usually the stuff of subsidised experimental music festivals, I’d much rather experience it in a 50 cap basement with stinky ravers.