[MMM]

After over a decade spent operating at a near whisper, MMM seem to be hitting something of a stride recently. Fiedel has started unleashing some very good solo records and continues to play a strong role on Berghain’s residents roster, while Errorsmith has been reissuing some of his influential and much-loved DJ tools, which carry the same potency in 2013 as they did in 2003. The pair’s sixth record continues their run of spacious rave starters, but takes some of the cues from their incredible Shangaan Electro remix and results in the strongest MMM outing since “Donna.” “Que Barbaro” on the A-side pairs a skipping rhythm with earth-shaking subs and guitars that seem ripped right out of classic Smith N Hack records, doing the job you expect MMM records to do admirably.

MMM, “Casio Dub”

But the real reason you’re here is the incredible B-side. “Casio Dub” is easily the most relaxed thing the duo have ever done together, but rather than subvert the pair’s rave-y identity, it distills it into a potent, heady blend. The skipping rhythm is still there, but the bass line now operates in a near vacuum, accompanied solely by slowly modulating delayed guitar chords. Bass notes that would sound understated on Erik + Fiedel’s other records are crystal clear here, content to walk around and explore the space they’ve created. As opposed to past MMM records, the space here no longer reminds of the massive power plant of Berghain but instead of an open-air field, giving “Casio Dub” a sense of levity typically absent from MMM’s bigger-room tunes. It suits them well, and coupled with the quirky guitar licks of the A-side makes for a record sure to find a home in many a DJ’s bag this summer.

[Fabric]

“Sandwell District is dead” — except when they’re not. Since their watershed moment a couple years ago — which is tough to define, but probably around Feed-Forward — Sandwell District has come to embody much more than just a label. The notion of a collective à la Basic Channel seems particularly apropos, as the label’s 30-odd releases recycled themes and remixed itself like “Lyot” or Quadrant before it — information was scarce, but close listeners and label devotees could quickly draw up a map of what versions of “Variance” existed where, and where exactly you heard that pattern on “Speed + Sound” before (SDSMP1 A2, for those playing along at home). Increasingly, Sandwell District referred to itself with a “we” instead of an “I,” muddying the waters between the artist and label fields so as to bring both into question. And yet Sandwell District the live act has always been somewhat strictly Function and Regis, relegating Silent Servant to somewhat of a third-wheel status, despite undoubtedly contributing the lion’s share of the label’s aesthetic.

Unfortunately, Silent Servant is also undoubtedly the best DJ of the triumvirate, and the long-rumored Sandwell District Fabric CD is sorely missing his touch. Of course, it’s not entirely fair to rate a CD by two artists based on the absence of somebody else, but would I be missing that person if the CD were truly as satisfying as I want it to be? Perhaps it’s that the mystery is gone — Fabric 69 is a relatively straight-forward techno mix, there are very few exclusive/new tracks and all artist and label names are present and accounted for. I don’t think we’re all that superficial, though — surely it was, at the end of the day, the music and not the mystery that we loved about Sandwell District.

No, Fabric 69 is unfortunately a victim of expectations. Sandwell always seemed to operate in big strokes, with a good deal of pomp and circumstance accompanying many of their releases (and even some of their Tumblr posts), each feeling indicative of something beyond just the music contained therein. Don’t get me wrong: Fabric 69 is not a bad mix. Regis opens with a stunning, expertly plotted nine-track sequence of his remixes and Sandwell-affiliated names, moving quickly through sinister atmospheres and setting the stage wonderfully. It switches gears with Mary Velo’s “Detune,” an excellent slice of swinging, chord-driven techno that feels like the first track to really get played out, but by the midpoint of the mix you’ll probably feel that not a whole lot has happened since then and the momentum doesn’t really shift much.

The “big” tracks, the ones that really stick out, are almost exclusively tracks that you certainly know (by Carl Craig, Plastikman) or tracks that get played to death (Untold’s “Motion The Dance”). The rest tend to be nice but rather forgettable — either because they’re mixed through so quickly that they don’t leave an impression, or because they mostly seem like somewhat bland Sandwell imitations. Even Mark Ernestus’ Shangaan remix, a personal candidate for one of the finest tracks in recent memory, seems to sit uncomfortably in the mix — a splash of color and spacious tones in a sea of hard-hitting techno.

The mix closes with Function’s great “Voiceprint (Reprise),” which I claimed earlier this year is a natural closer, and certainly a mix that starts with “Voiceprint” and ends with its techno reprise is sensible and destined to resonate on a thematic level. Fabric 69, however, is missing something in the route from point A to point B — the aggressive, situationist provocation that runs through Regis and Function’s career has been softened, and the coherent, narrative brilliance that marks Sandwell’s catalog is absent. You never get swept up by Fabric 69, rather you plod along like a club night where the music is pretty good but the endorphins just don’t materialize. Regis and Function have been almost supernaturally on-form as of late as producers, which makes the CD’s disappointment all the more peculiar and disheartening.

[Modern Love]

If you had to ascribe one specific audio format to techno, it would undoubtedly be the vinyl 12″. Techno has a special relationship with the 12″; the traditional notion of an “album” just doesn’t cut it when an artist wants to make a big statement. Enter the series — a related set of 12″s where the typical techno aesthetic is maintained, but where an artist can explore an idea or a vibe over the course of a finite number of related records. From the color-coded excursions of Wolfgang Voigt (Studio 1) and Donnacha Costello (Colorseries) through Shed’s white-label runs and the many series plotted by Ernestus and von Oswald, the 12″ series often represents an artist’s most considered and thoughtful explorations within dance music. Modern Love has long embraced the conceptual series, both explicitly in the form of Claro Intelecto’s timeless Warehouse Sessions and Deepchord’s dub-techno masterpiece The Coldest Season, and implicitly, as the single-digit numbers on the label’s earliest releases hint at the idea. Yet Demdike Stare have already proven themselves as the label’s most series-focused act, with Tryptych and Elemental quickly positioning themselves high on the list of high-concept, artsy processions of dance music.

Demdike Stare, “Grows Without Bound”

No surprise, then, that 2013 sees the launch of a new collection of records under the Testpressing banner. This time Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker strip away the ornate art that has long accompanied their releases — seeing Shed’s white labels and upping the ante in the austerity department by packaging these records in plain paper sleeves with pressing plant paperwork still inside. In a way, the sleeves make perfect sense, as the first volume sounds so rough and free-flowing it seems both hot off the press and somewhat incomplete, like experiments too wild and potent to be edited or dialed down. “Collision” offers harsh, heavily filtered noise and busted jungle percussion, an infectious blend that seems sourced straight from the id. Flipped over, the chanting voices and shuffling rhythms of “Misappropriation” are perhaps more quickly identifiable as the work of Demdike Stare, but it’s just as foreboding as the A-side, ready to rip apart the floor of the darkest club in town.

The second volume throws some more curveballs, as “Grows Without Bound” mines deep into intimidating, noisy chords that slowly progress alongside distant, stealthy rhythms. But it’s B-side “Primitive Equations” that goes for the jugular, as Italian library samples and whispering voices deviously mingle with dank bass rubs and shattered rhythms. That might sound like business as usual for the Northern duo, but the way it progresses reminds of countless Modern Love dance-floor slayers come before, especially those on the Daphne sub-label. It’s got a particular UK hardcore sensibility about it that Demdike have cloaked thus far under mountains of worldly samples from far-flung places. So far, the Testpressing series has seen them embrace these UK routes in their own idiosyncratic fashion. But unlike their previous series, they have not told the public where the endpoint for Testpressing is. Whether we get one more or ten more, the mantra for Testpressing seems to be “expect the unexpected, enthusiastically,” and one would be keen to do so.

[Dolly Dubs]

Martyn on Dolly: the chameleonic Dutchman releasing on the resolutely house-focused label of a Dutchwoman. It’s been more than a year since Martyn’s last proper record (the wonderful Ghost People album), and the Newspeak EP largely continues down the 4/4 trail he’s been traveling for awhile now. The exception to this is the record’s massive A-side “Oceania,” a shimmering slice of vintage Martyn. It sounds like it could have been taken right from his 2008 heyday, with its 136-BPM vaguely broken beats, walking sub-bass, and breezy atmospherics all recalling classic Apple Pips and 3024 releases. It’s kind of thrilling to hear this style again. It was such an unavoidable part of the late-2000s landscape that pretty much evaporated after the 10,000th “Bristol × Berlin / Techno × Dubstep” article, but “Oceania” proves that there’s still a lot of vibrancy in the form. With so much of the UK (still) running away as fast as they can from 140 BPM and into the cozy arms of dull house, strong, fleet-footed steppers like “Oceania” become curious breaths of fresh air.

Of course, the B-side is made up of two straight-laced house cuts, but Martyn is far too savvy a producer to resort to faceless house recycling, and Dolly far too good of a label to peddle the stuff. For all the talk of “Martyn music” being its own distinct thing, Martyn tends to actually make good on his word, and the B-side is full of his signature touches and personality flourishes. Rushing out of the gate is “Newspeak” — and I mean that quite literally, as it’s basically missing a lead-in groove which makes cuing a particularly annoying task. Either way, the track itself is a lovely bass line-led stomper, while “What is Room 101″ builds confidently with blurry chords and propulsive percussion work. Overall, the Newspeak EP is a strong record, deftly reliving the producer’s halcyon days while forging ahead with the kind of amiable house sounds that Martyn unleashes on dance floors worldwide every weekend.

[Warp Records]

Exai is a monolith — a large, heavy, slate cardboard box that contains four thick-cut slabs of vinyl. It arrives as a bit of a dare, egging you on to drop what you’re doing and sink deep into its two-hour runtime, and those of us who count themselves as Ae junkies likely don’t have to think twice about doing so. Yet the most intriguing and imposing thing about Exai was the mystery it contained: just what was this new record going to sound like? Aside from Confield, 2010′s Oversteps marked the single biggest side-step of the Rochdale duo’s career, taking the labyrinthine, exceedingly complex rhythms they’ve been mining in the 21st century and applying what they’ve learned to melody. Baroque, haunting, and beautiful, Oversteps seemed poised to usher in Autechre 3.0: a new kink dividing their discography like Confield did before.

It didn’t. Exai will sound stylistically familiar to Autechre fans, almost comfortingly so, but it raises plenty of new challenges. Much has been written of its length, but then it’s hard to tell exactly how we’re expected to consume this album. Two hours of any artist can be a chore, and given the sheer density of their music, it’s hard to imagine that Booth and Brown expect our undivided attention for Exai‘s entire runtime. Digesting it as four vinyl records works reasonably well, though I personally believe it works best as two complimentary CDs. Autechre have always shined in the CD format; something about their music is perfect for 60 minutes but ends up less engaging in shorter or longer doses.

Either way, for all its density, Exai contains some of Autechre’s most immediate music in a very long time. “FLeure” reacquaints us with the seemingly incoherent, cacophonous web of rhythms that Autechre are known for by throwing us in the deep end. There are few lifelines to grab hold of until dark, distorted bass tones puncture the track, upping the urgency considerably while starting to provide some context for the tangle of rhythmic shards. Things settle down in “irlite (get 0)” with clearer beats and the introduction of some tangible melodies, evolving in its own time and feeling like the first deep glance we get at Exai‘s overall vibe. “prac-f,” “Flep,” and “tuinorizn” reflect the hip-hop influence Booth and Brown have always nursed naturally and effortlessly, reminding that for all their heady experimentation, Autechre remain eternal b-boys.

Cuts like “vekoS” and “cloudline” navigate what sounds like a landscape of spectral, shattered rhythms of Autechre past, often with a contorted synth sound playing the role of Virgil. Exai, at times, even sounds like Autechre have gone so far as to sample themselves (I swear I hear something from Chiastic Slide in “Flep” or perhaps some of Gantz Graf ripped to shreds in “1 1 is”). Digesting and versioning their own gargantuan discography into a similarly mammoth piece of work often opens up alluring new paths, such as on the spacious, foreboding “nodezsh” or on the incredible, blunted hip-hop of “deco Loc.” On Exai, Autechre have never sounded quite so much like Autechre, but each track shines a light down a compelling new avenue that the duo could follow ad infinitum were they not so wonderfully scatterbrained.

Exai contains a handful of “big” tracks that stand out and pay off in myriad ways. “jatevee C” is a bright, chords-driven slab of heavy, stomping rhythmic cadences that provides immediate and lasting levity. The most stunning moments of Exai, however, come at the end of CD1 and CD2, respectively. “bladelores” is the records’ longest cut, and its place as Act I’s closer is well deserved. It tunnels deep into the major tropes and ideas on show throughout Exai, but with a majestic sense of forward momentum and space that sucks the listener in and threatens to never let go. Stronger still is “YJY UX,” which flits between delicate ambiences and overblown rhythms with a bass line that’s almost catchy. As a statement of intent, it’s sublime, and as a summation and reflection of all that came before it, does its job commendably. Exai is puzzling and frustrating, urgent and patient, suffocating and breathless. As Autechre have always done, they present something that asks a whole lot of questions and doesn’t even entertain the notion of answering them. For longtime fans, you couldn’t ask for anything more. For those who have yet to be acquainted with Rochdale’s finest, Exai might not provide the easiest entry point, but it might just offer the most comprehensive.

LWE’s Curator’s Cuts podcast series features our staff mixing together recent favorites and providing explanations for their selections. LWE’s associate editor, Chris Miller, compiled Curator’s Cuts 29. We will post the tracklist later in the week, as the curator discloses and describes it as part of the podcast.

Curator’s Cuts 29: Chris Miller (131:54)

Tracklist:

01. Pye Corner Audio, “The Ever-Present Hum Part 1 (Motorway)”
[The Tapeworm]
02. Chasing Voices, “Awoken By Tears” [Preserved Instincts]
03. Fred P., “Open (Mars Mix)” [Soul People Music]
04. Orpheus, “Waiting For Your Call” [Sequencias]
05. Terekke, “Bank3″ [L.I.E.S.]
06. Hieroglyphic Being, “A Time Warp Synthesizer” [Mathematics]
07. Morphosis, “Flash” [M>O>S]
08. Bass Clef, “Dawn Chorus Pedal” [Idle Hands]
09. Xosar, “Elixir Of Dreams” [Rush Hour Recordings]
10. Shed, “Increase That” [Soloaction]
11. James T. Cotton, “The Drain” [Spectral Sound]
12. 808State, “Narcossa” [Creed Records]
{airbreak}
13. Vril, “V9″ [Giegling Staub]
14. Levon Vincent, “Stereo Systems” [Novel Sound]
15. Function, “Against The Wall” [Ostgut Ton]
16. Fiedel, “Andreas (Bonus Beats)” [Fiedel]
17. Trevino, “Forged” [Klockworks]
18. Cheap and Deep, “Beautiful” [Modular Cowboy]
19. Mathew Jonson, “Typerope” [Itiswhatitis]
20. Young Male, “Black Satin Fan” [White Material]
21. Daso & Pawas, “Det” (Schatrax Remix) [Spectral Sound]
22. Jabberjaw, “Girlfriend” [Perlon]
23. Shawn O’Sullivan, “Security” [The Corner]
24. MMM, “Re-tics” [MMM]
25. Thomas Bangalter, “What To Do” [Roulé]
26. Delroy Edwards, “Feelings” [L.I.E.S.]
27. Marcel Dettmann, “Push” [Ostgut Ton]
28. Conforce, “Last Anthem” [Delsin]
29. Anthony Naples, “Moscato” [Mister Saturday Night Records]
30. Florian Kupfer, “Feelin” [L.I.E.S.]

[Preserved Instincts]

Dispatches from Myrtle Avenue: Dope Jams is gone and a stroller store is taking its place. While this development won’t surprise many New Yorkers, there’s still something altogether perverse, triumphant, and sinister about prospective parents shopping for baby gear in a store that housed books on Satanism and some truly subversive music. Though the physical store may be gone, the webshop has remained open and all of the Slow To Speak exclusives, reissues, and oddities seem to be continuing apace. Some of the most intriguing of those curios the past couple years have been the Chasing Voices 12″s, (almost) all single-sided techno excursions that operate on their own frequencies. Releasing approximately one track a year isn’t exactly the road to techno superstardom, but enough intrigue and interest has been generated by each Chasing Voices missive to make every release a minor event.

Awoken By Tears, the fifth from our genuinely shadowy operators, is simply their best work yet. It seems to fold many of the things they’ve tried along the way (the distorted syncopation of “Acidbathory,” the cutthroat techno of “Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit,” the foreboding, morose electronics of “Another Walk”) into a satisfying, sinister whole. Ceaselessly building (and building, and building) towards a climax that never arrives, myriad elements are stacked one on top of the other in a deliberately overwhelming fashion. Rhythmically suffocating, “Awoken By Tears” is a dance track for the most ruthless of dance floors — one populated by feral creatures and the flayed men seen on the record sleeve. Millions of press releases try to create an artifice of mystery and ingenuity around artists and labels, and the daring, unknowable work of Chasing Voices reminds why all of these attempts ultimately fail.

[Raster-Noton]

Who were the first electronic music pop stars? Electronics slowly crept into pop music throughout the 70s and exploded in the 80s, but Kraftwerk revolutionized both genres by combining them effortlessly, in ways that seem both obvious to modern audiences as well as ways completely absent from the millennial pop landscape. Today, electronic pop music is everywhere, whether it’s identified as such (your Skrillexes and Deadmic3) or not. Kraftwerk’s genius was bringing true electronic music (in the academic, avant-garde sense) to the masses. They didn’t just use synthesizers and rudimentary drum machines to create traditional songs and melodies (though they did that very well) — they embraced their machines fully, all the ticks and oddities inherent in the circuits, as well as all of the possibilities previously unexplored therein.

Digital audio and the computer multiplied those ticks, oddities, and possibilities by a nearly infinite degree, yet few have really taken what was at the base of Kraftwerk’s success as a template. We have some incredible experimental music that explores the digital domain (Raster-Noton being a foremost example), but the electronic sounds of pop music hasn’t progressed a whole lot since the 808 — the machine’s fetishization seems to know no bounds. Atom™ isn’t exactly palling around with Timbaland and Pharrell, but on his new album, HD, he takes a couple pages from Kraftwerk in his acerbic exploration of electronics in pop music; the cover even looks like it was taken from the same sessions as Electric Cafe.

Heads take note: this is a pop record. It is, being the work of Uwe Schmidt, full of impeccably crafted sounds, deliberately placed, utilizing every little nook and cranny of your speakers for maximum effect, and is an absolute joy to listen to and behold. Yet while half the record plays with technoid pop structures, many of these tracks seem poised to hit the Hot 100 in the year 3000. That Schmidt has somehow managed to make futuristic-sounding pop music 30 years after the acceptance of electronics in pop underlines just how little the timbres of mainstream music have really evolved, as well as just how serious he takes his subject matter. The digital rockabilly of “The Sound of Decay” and MTV-baiting “Empty” are a bit overblown for my taste, but the chewed-up, digital distortion of the former and clinical, nearly-soulless sounds of the latter warn in no uncertain terms of the dangers inherent in 21st-century pop music. The Kraftwerkian stomp of “Stop (Imperialist Pop)” even calls out the perpetrators by name.

“I Love U (Like I Love My Drum Machine)” would be the obvious lead single of the album had it come out on RCA instead of Raster-Noton. It’s enjoyable enough, and even if you, like me, tend to find Jamie Lidell’s vocals seriously annoying, the absurdity makes it the record’s most thematically pointed. The line, “In the words of Martin Luther… (I have a dream)… now hear my drum computer” is so laughably dumb and borderline offensive it seems less gratuitous and more of a jab at how common this kind of thing is, especially in house music, shamefully.

Even the tracks on HD nominally for the techno heads are not without bite, as the majestic, beautiful “Riding The Void” is almost overbearingly sarcastic. It sounds like an Ellen Allien track with lyrics like “When our hands touched… on the dance floor,” and you can just imagine Schmidt snickering to himself as he says it. But it’s such a lovely, incredibly produced piece of music you barely feel guilty for succumbing to Schmidt’s manipulations. “Strom” is another major highlight, an ode to electricity and its units, whose flourishes (that bass line around the word “musik”) and subtle melodic resonances are endlessly captivating. HD asks a lot from the listener, including bearing with a cover of “My Generation,” but what you put into it HD returns in multitudes. Unlike the academic music sometimes found on similar labels which are difficult listens, HD is candy coated and goes down easy without diluting its cynicism and caustic ideas. HD has plenty of strong “techno” cuts to satisfy those of us who tend to dislike pop music, but no matter what your genre proclivities, HD is well worth repeated listens.

[The Corner]

Anthony Parasole is from Brooklyn: that his new label, The Corner, is the most evocative of Kings County in some time should come as little surprise. This isn’t the “new” Brooklyn filled with artisanal mayonnaise and pickle shops, budding musicians, and bad mustaches, but rather Brooklyn as the dance-music powerhouse of the past 20 years. Parasole’s major precursor is Adam X, a man who looked at the house and disco coming from the Paradise Garage and the Limelight across the East River and went in a different direction, putting his borough on the techno map with Detroit and Berlin instead of Manhattan. Gritty, desolate, and industrial was how the borough sounded, and Parasole has embraced those and other sounds of the borough with his own Atlantic Ave and the hip-hop/house combination of the Tri-State EP.

Stepping up for release number three is Shawn O’Sullivan, whose rough and ready records for L.I.E.S. and W.T. have already earned him numerous plaudits. “Security” storms out of the gate with the straight-laced thump of vintage Regis — an excellent club track that throbs and warps over its seemingly too brief runtime. Teaming up with Beau Wanzer as Civil Duty, “Courier” is a rattling, distorted slice of mental body music, and O’Sullivan finishes up solo with the stepping, ominous “Crisis”. Together with The Corner’s strong design flourishes (the mob hit cover art, label decreeing that “Help is on the way”), Security depicts scenes from a rugged, violent city. As a soundtrack to the darkest De Niro movie (n)ever made, it hits all the right buttons, and should be a staple in every techno lover’s bag for the months to come.

[Confused House]

If the idea of hardware-oriented jam sessions doesn’t strike you as particularly novel in 2013, you’re not alone. With more Roland-led tracks and “organic” compositions than you can shake a stick at, the current house landscape would seem in danger of eating itself, sooner or later, after every possible 707 pattern had been plugged in by nerdy gear fetishists. However, much like Jeff Mills’ “wonderful hindrance” of a 4/4 pulse, this ineludible genre of analog jam-session house still has plenty of life left in it past the jackin’ Chicago retreads and bangin’ warehouse acid seeping in from all corners. In putting together tracks that brim with personality and a flare for the aberrant, roommates Steve Summers and Bookworms unleash a triptych of heady, masterful house tracks.

Confused House, Summers’ new label for collaborative tunes, could just as well be a nickname for the apartment he shares with Bookworms — one imagines them recording jams endlessly into the early mornings, leaving their hardware running while out doing errands, and sifting through the best ideas to arrive at the three cuts presented here. Their house is less “confused” and more “delirious,” twisting through unsteady sounds at a leisurely pace. “Possible Worlds” is the most uptempo thing here despite stumbling through hazy melodies and hypnagogic rhythms, but it’s an exquisite take on atmospheric house. With a mellow, stop/start pulse and bright, airy textures, “Unknown Number” drifts further off into a dream-like state, where “Let It Run” slows things down even further with bubbling, whirlpool synth-scapes and a bass line lost somewhere in the bong haze. It’s potent stuff, sounding like neither artists’ solo work but totally in line with their sensibilities. Grab it while you can, as you’ll probably have to ring up your delivery guy to get a hold of the next one.