Articles
2011 Artists' Picks
Spotlight 5
Albums
1982
Marvin Ayres
Big Quarters
Birds Of Passage
Brunborg / Huke
bvdub
Charlatan
City of Satellites
Cokiyu
CYNE
Dakota Suite / Sirjacq
Tomoyoshi Date
Dday One
Vladislav Delay
Ensemble Economique
Esperanza
Frost & Bjarnason
Integral
Lullatone
Mario & Vidis
Dean McPhee
Mint Julep
Muhr
James Murray
Muta
Nicholas: Nu Groove
pacificUV
Papir
Andrew Pekler
Pimmon
Simon Scott
Quentin Sirjacq
Stormloop
Swod
szilárd
Tapage
Carl Taylor
Willamette
Boo Williams
Reissue
Pink Floyd
Compilations / Mixes
Marcel Dettmann
Fabriksampler V4
Inertia: Resisting Routine
Tech My House 5
Visionquest
EPs
0311
A Sun-Amissa
Jacksonville
Arev Konn
Neon Cloud
Phasen
Photonz
Rivers Home
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