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November 20, 2009

Philip Sherburne on The Year In Techno...

Pitchfork | Read Full Story >

This year, techno may have surprised me even less than house, but it often moved me more. Part of that may be accountable simply to my mood: pessimistic, a little antisocial, given to Romantic-style reveries. Techno hit all these notes in 2009. For dark, steely, ominous, sky-splitting, velvety doom, you couldn’t do better than Manchester’s Modern Love label, which continued to prove that “dub techno” doesn’t begin and end with Basic Channel. Records from Andy Stott, MLZ and Claro Intelecto stuck to familiar parameters—leaden bass, grainy textures, hi-hats shimmering like a smelt run—but made ample case for their existence with vigorous, visceral sensuality and actual melodic hooks of the sort that far too often get forgotten in dub techno’s focus on mood. These artists also blurred the lines between techno and other forms of bass music. Andy Stott and MLZ—via Stott’s “Drippin” and the duo’s releases as Millie & Andrea for their semi-incognito Daphne label—begged the question of where techno ends and dubstep begins with raised tempos, half-speed pulses, free-falling bass drops and a grievous, lurching swing. Berlin’s Scuba mined similar territory with “Klinik”, redirecting dubstep’s lurching cadences into a headlong rush that worked just as well slotted in with four-to-the-floor.



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