Title: Gain Of Function
Artist: Dustin Zahn
Label: Rekids
Cat Number: REKIDS192
Genre: Techno
A1: Tell Me About Paradise
A2: Tangie Groove
B1: Lucid Dreams
B2: Smoking In Silence
C1: Crimson Cheeks
C2; Days Like These
D1: Shark Rodeo ft. Jeremy Black
D2: Next Level Looseness
I imagine that trying to make a techno album which sounds and feels original is one of the hardest jobs on music at the moment. Where do you go on once you’re out of the loop? “Forged from a series of live jams with two drum machines and two synths”, this collection is as robust and as varied as anything you’re likely to hear operating within the traditional techno template with a subtle undercurrent of funky freshness. Tracks like ‘Crimson Cheeks’ and ‘Tangie Groove’ deploy vocal samples masterfully, and ‘Next Level Looseness’ is an off-kilter way of bowing out, the breaks sounding like they have been derived from organic matter in a state of heightened stress. ‘Days Like These’ and ‘Smoking In Silence’ are obviously taking their cues from the golden age of Detroit minimalism, with the latter embellished by a subtle vocal sample, more melodic and in the shape of the track than those mentioned earlier. ‘Tell Me About Paradise’ is a suitably ominous opener which gathers pace, expanding and contracting like a machine funk concertina, while ‘Shark Rodeo ft. Jeremy Black’ is a suitably unhinged loopfest which does the barrel organ on crack genre no harm at all. It’s synthetically-derived, like the best of its genre, and otherworldly enough to provide DJs with their requisite layers of insect menace for whatever purpose they may want to deploy it.
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