VA: Inertia: Resisting Routine
Ann Aimee

Inertia: Resisting Routine is tailor-made for those moments when the need for brutal, dark techno strikes. Put simply, the debut compilation from Delsin sub-label Ann Aimee is about as hard-hitting and precision-tooled a techno gathering as one might hope to find this side of Ostgut Ton. It's all new material, too, with Marsel Delsin, the head of the Dutch label, having compiled and commissioned sixteen exclusives for the release by an impressive cast of modern underground producers that includes Mike Dehnert, Roman Lindau, and Sacha Rydell (all three associated with the Berlin-based Fachwerk label founded by Dehnert in 2008), Cosmin TRG (50Weapons), Redshape (Delsin), and Lucy (Stroboscopic Artefacts), among others. Issued also as a four-part series of vinyl EPs, the CD version presents the material in a mix format with the Dutch producer Niels Luinenburg aka Delta Funktionen at the controls.

At the mix's start, dubby winds blow across the icy terrain of Sascha Rydell's “Rainy Days,” its unstoppable rolling groove a harbinger of the road ahead. Ozka and Roman Lindau power the respectively jacking swing of “Square Beauty” and “Borne” with ten-ton thump, and, as obsessively focused as a timepiece mechanism, Marcelus's “24-7” and Redshape's “Static” offer sleek, modern-day updates on mind-numbing old-school techno. Boris Bunnik adds some rather cosmic and electro-tinged flair to the proceedings in his Conforce cut “When It Appeared,” before Lucy takes over for a trademark exercise in head-spinning scene-painting called “Wytonia” that somehow manages to connect the dots between deep house and abstract electronica and make it work. Elsewhere, Milton Bradley sneaks in a welcome smattering of funk into the mix via “Sequence #1,” while Area Forty_One brings a touch of psycho-acid to the set in “C.N.T.C.T.”

Luinenburg rolls out wave upon wave of wired-up rhythms in a dizzying mix of thump and swing (including his own Delta Funktionen stormer “Torpor”), some of it hard-core techno and some of it more house-inflected. The best of it pushes ahead into brave, experimental zones, such as Lucy's “Wytonia” and Redshape's “Static,” and one of the things that's most appealing about the mix is that most tracks are three to five minutes in length, making the mercurial mix move quickly from one track to the next and never lodging itself in any one place for too long.

January 2012