[Horizontal Ground]

Being a record collector, especially a collector of dance records, occasionally drives one to generalize. There are just too many releases floating around, both new and old, to not develop heuristics to guide you through the bins. For me, at least, these seemingly harmless assumptions about who sounds like what and what sounds like whom often cause great music to get lost in the shuffle. Horizontal Ground may be an unfortunately prime example of this tendency, because my longstanding read on these guys increasingly seems wrong or at least incomplete. Between the sonic austerity and pure functionality of tracks by their parent label Frozen Border, that one dude with all the numbers and decimal points for a name, and their famously terse Talking Shopcast, I thought I’d had them pegged as a purest-of-pure techno label. But listening to at least the label’s last three releases — Skirt’s sublimely brittle “In The Meadow Under The Stars,” Szare’s sexy and stepping HG08, and now AnD’s HG09 — leaves me with the impression that the crew is stretching its wings and maybe not looking to fly quite in the direction I’d expected.

It’s not like the label’s ninth release isn’t techno — in fact, it’s possible that it’s the most techno thing they’ve put out in a minute — but AnD, a rather mysterious production unit who as 1.n.4 brought us HG05, doesn’t sit squarely in the genre’s sweet spot for very long. Syrupy yet steadfastly digital, the A-side feels as much like a scary dream as it does a sexy one. Despite its cathedral-like dimensions, its core of loping bass and Sandwell District snares could have driven a more intimate track just as successfully. Things are complicated further on the flip. An extended percussion intro on the B1 seems to be barreling toward a UK-style sub-bass drop, and low and behold, that’s precisely what it does. Where Sigha, a producer who’s spent the last few years distancing himself from his Hotflush roots, reaches techno by digging past dubstep, AnD here seem to have done something like the opposite, suctioning much of the joy but none of the funk out of funky. On the surface, the result sounds more Sub:Stance than straight-up Berghain, but a DJ could easily take this thing in either direction. All kinds of styles deep and demonic are apparently in the process of digestion on the ambient B2, and the track serves as a perfect summation of where Horizontal Ground stands right now: the label could so easily plop down into one category or another, but isn’t it more interesting and challenging to slide into the potentially bottomless chasms in between? Whatever curiosities they bring up from the depths next is anyone’s guess.