Kevin Reynolds: Liaisons / Port
Nsyde Music

Casting its gaze upon the future while drawing upon classic techno and house traditions, Detroit producer Kevin Reynolds shows that doing time as an audio engineer for Derrick may's Transmat label has clearly helped ready him for his own solo productions. Casting its gaze upon the future while drawing upon Detroit music traditions, the declamatory A-side cut “Liasons” overlays a raw tribal thump with electronic tom-tom fills, violent stabs, and synth washes. It's a wide-screen affair emblazoned with rich colour and all manner of percussive swing that cultivates an air of measured uplift in its insistent attack. “Port” likewise carves a path through a detailed percussive field of acoustic and electronic sounds before a Kraftwerk-styled synth motif punctuates the track's deeply roiling pulse; the B-side's rounded out by a “Liasons (Del Parque Mix)” that plays like an abbreviated edit on the original and departs minimally if at all from its mid-tempo thump. Reynolds' two-tracker for Nsyde Music, a Berlin-based label specializing in techno and house, finds the producer putting his amply developed skills to good use in material equally satisfying for the body and soul. It's not visionary but nevertheless immaculately arranged and certainly solid enough on musical grounds.

November 2011