At the risk of straw-manning a po-faced caricature of contemporary club culture, it’s always refreshing to hear a new techno record that’s unapologetically fun. It’s not that this stuff has to come with great punchlines or an exaggerated sense of joie de vivre, but when so much club music takes itself slightly too seriously, records which acknowledge the inherent mischief and intimacy of dance culture are a welcome addition to a crowded, occasionally dour field. Despite or perhaps because of its expansive approach to genre (this isn’t a straight-up techno record, but is perhaps most easily understood as one), Driving Through A Tunnel That Is Filling From Both Ends, is one such release: explorative, compulsive, and just occasionally, a bit of a laugh.
Melbourne duo KXB lead on production duties here, and as on their previous release Areas of Uncertainty, they venture across a remarkably wide range of styles and atmospheres, from Basic Channel-esque predawn prowls (‘Soft Knock’) to breathy kosmiche (‘The Art of Relaxed Conversation’) via paranoid darkwave, sticky house and bionic garage rock. Berlin artist Thrush provides their arrangements with commanding yet aloof vocal counterpoints, insinuating herself into KXB’s rhythms. ‘Still Or Already’ showcases this brilliantly, a twitchy, anxious workout of a track that retains its allure through each convulsion.
Like Thrush’s other band, industrial techno-cum-free jazz-inflected no wave collective Concentration, there’s a healthy amount of sweaty desire in evidence here, but it’s more sublimated and discreet than in that group’s more leery, provocative work. Driving Through… feels more like an exploration of the dark corners in which something transgressive might be happening rather than a full-frontal depiction of the acts themselves, with Thrush our enigmatic guide through KXB’s labyrinthine structures. That she sometimes disappears for a while – even occasionally being replaced by a misanthropic Scot (‘Disnaeland’) or Cockney showbiz wheeler-dealer (‘Tony’) – simply adds to the album’s sense of twisting, shadowy space, of being slightly lost between bass-pounded rooms at a stupid time of the morning. Like a lot of great techno records, Driving Through… has real physicality, the feeling of an organic force pulling the levers, a quickening pulse somewhere beneath the chrome-plated surface.
The aesthetic restlessness of this record, as well as the mercurial nature of Thrush’s vocals, give Driving Through… an occasionally disjointed, mixtapey quality that may jar for genre purists or those desiring a more seamless statement. Maybe that’s simply the price of experimentation. Maybe it’s a product of the remote-work style of this album’s construction, with the continental distance between its creators only closing for two afternoons of recording in Melbourne. Either way, a record’s internal logic need not always be totally coherent. Perhaps it’s more interesting to leave us with a few loose ends. The best club nights rarely make perfect sense the morning after, and there’s plenty on this record to justify the comedown.
