Collection: Techno

Bell Curve’s kaleidoscopic music pushes from the club out into the cosmos. As a co-founder of New York label and promoter Worst Behavior, she has fast become a pillar of the city’s underground music community, championing future-seeking sounds from the ever-expanding ecosphere of soundsystem culture and bass music. Her own productions and DJ sets draw from an equally eclectic pool of sonics, reconfiguring familiar club sounds into tracks that defiantly evade easy categorisation. Following collaborations with Deep Medi / Young Echo MC Rider Shafique and critical acclaim from the likes of DJ Mag and Resident Advisor, new EP Obelisk for Berlin’s SSPB provides a daring evolution of Bell Curve’s soundworld, channeling the bristling intensity of her previous work into a more expansive headspace. Alongside six mesmerising new tracks from Bell Curve, the EP features a remix from Hessle Audio rising star Toumba. Obelisk was conceived as a deep dive into a specific aspect of Bell Curve’s soundworld, focusing on more minimalist, psychedelic sonics. While much of the material was written over the course of several years - sketches developed alongside Bell Curve’s recent hyper-kinetic releases, the EP finally coalesced during a particularly prolific 6 months in the last year. Stripping pieces back to skeletal rhythmic architectures and exploring slower BPMs, Bell Curve opened up space for transcendence, avoiding the allure of breakdowns and drops to instead use subtle gestures to guide pieces to ecstatic peaks. Club sonics are here plucked from their original contexts and expanded outwards - icy rave stabs on “Staircase” ascending into the heavens or the astral breaks and springy bass of “Hope It Gets Better”. Subtle shifts in tone and texture guide the listener through the trip, reverb tails slowly extending into lysergic drift or rippling grain and feedback rising from pulsing bass tones. Jordanian producer Toumba amps up the tempo on his remix of “Staircase” while maintaining the original’s emotional core, bolstering the track’s dextrous rhythms with distinctive Levantine timbres. Throughout, Bell Curve demonstrates her masterful command of tension and release, locking listeners into hypnotic rhythmic coils that build to feverish pitch before opening out into celestial expanses. Obelisk captures a constant push and pull between emotional states - from anxiety and melancholy to joy and euphoria, working through turmoil to find transcendence. Tracks like “Dance Skeleton Dance” particularly invoke this duality, drawing catharsis from darker sonics, reconfiguring bass pressure and anxious percussion into a humid dancehall stepper. “Without U” contains emotional struggle as part of the very circumstances of its making - written while working through heartbreak, its delicate repetitions and searching tone reflecting the process of reconnecting with oneself. Title track “Obelisk” forms the emotional core of the EP, coalescing from weightless vapors into dramatic synthesizer motifs, evoking euphoric memories of complete immersion on the dancefloor and our ability to find ecstatic experience even in the contemporary hellscape. The EP and track name were inspired by sci-fi series The Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin, a work that explores contemporary power dynamics and ecological issues through the lens of dystopia and magical realism, featuring giant floating obelisks as remnants of an ancient technologically advanced civilisation. Bell Curve’s own Obelisk provides a perfect analog - processing human struggle through futuristic sonics and capturing the human experience while also providing an escape from it. Obelisk compiles Bell Curve’s most compelling and enthralling work to date. Reveling in dazzling repetition and delicate sonic nuance, it is a cathartic and defiant statement in an industry that increasingly demands hollow immediacy and caters to short attention spans - an homage to struggles and affirmation of strength and self-belief, while equally offering euphoric escape for those willing to spend time inside its mystic whorl.

Orlando Voorn's Frequency alias reaches back to the start of the 90s and the beginning of the Dutch techno legend's career. As has been evident from a series of releases on Clone spin-off label Repetitive Rhythmic Research the name bears plenty of inspiration for Voorn in the modern age, as he juggles vivid, sounds with impressionistic flair to create the kind of non-conformist twist on Detroit techno you might otherwise associate with Terrence Dixon. 'Turn The Light' is as sultry as it is freaky, whether you opt for the original mix or the dub. Alden Tyrell and Serge are on hand for a remix of the track which heads more directly towards gritty Euro techno intensity, leaving Voorn free to roll out a masterclass in broken beat dub techno funk on incredible B2 cut 'Space Dub Work'.

In the past few years Tom Ferreira has swiftly established his Fasme project as a strident voice in the field of emotionally-charged electro. Following a string of singles for labels like Craigie Knowes, Dream Ticket and Feel My Bicep, he's now delivering his debut album to Analogical Force. Bloom should hugely appeal to those who crave heart-swooning melodic lines in the midst of their snappy machine rhythms, but there's a full spectrum of moods explored as Ferreira glides from the staccato Moroder pulse of 'Pursuit' to the playful acid strut of 'Comete'. Throughout, the feels are placed front and centre of this instantly endearing record from a fast-rising talent.

Electro is fundamentally modern. The coldness of the machine laid bare, a human attempt to express through circuits and wiring. Despite adhering to specific codes and norms, it is a sound that refuses to be pigeonholed. It is with this in mind that Shipwrec has collected a wealth of international talent to showcase their own vision of this bracing style. Serge Geyzel incises from the needle drop, the acid blistered "Still There" is sliced and quartered by scissoring snares. Endfest changes the trajectory with the modular warmth of "La Chouffe" before the lines change and Manasyt delivers the darkened angles and punishing percussion of "Row Hammer." Andrew Red Hand maintains the shadowy synthlines of his predecessor, industrial undertones bubbling to the surface in distortion-soaked aggression. The mood shifts with Alpha Visitor. Crystalline chords are punctured by crisp drum patterns, stabbing keys and broad arcs unveil a world of sci-fi inspirations. The finale comes from Jauzas the Shining. Broad sweeps introduce "Shemale" before dripping drums are countered by samples and icy blasts. Modern machine music from six masters.

Klasse Wrecks has started a new catalogue naming convention for this Boy EP from Mogwaa which suggests it might be the start of a new series. Either way it's defined by an epic, side-long title cut that is a real house and techno fusion. It has the soulful pads of house but the drive of techno drums, with pitched-up hardcore vocals over the top and a bright, screwy acid line tearing up the middle. It's a beautiful collision of party-ready sounds. After that 14-plus minute epic is a half length VIP mix that distils everything into a more potent and direct track.

Best Records get right to the heart of true Italo disco with this body-poppin' killer from 1983. REM were made up of Paolo Alfani and Nicola Serena, both based in Florence and well ahead of the curve with their experimental electronic disco sound. Making fantastic use of the Mattel Speak & Spell for their vocal hooks, this enterprising duo cooked up a veritable club bomb with their fusion of sleek drum machine rhythms, throbbing acid basslines and romantic synth tones that would come to be widely used in Detroit techno some years later. There's a full original take of the track on the A side, while the flip features a tweaked "remix" version to give you even more of that robo-vocoder action.

XY0815 is as electro as it gets, and that's been proven plenty on the string of releases for brokntoys reaching back to 2018. As is common with the prolific label, this is electro to sit up and pay attention to, taking the blueprint of machine funk and giving it a fresh twist which stands out from the glut of soundalikes. Gates Need Inputs arrived in its first iteration last year and we're swiftly treated to this follow-up volume of eight new tracks which edge towards braindance territory in the plaintive synths which shape out the atmosphere of each track. There's analogue warmth and sonic detail edged in everywhere, but equally nothing feels cluttered or necessary. Very classy gear from a trusted stable in the modern electro scene.

It was the Sprungkartellwachs label that first put this out and soon after it became something of a cult classic that has since become much sought after. Mat Carter's own Varial label now has the rights to a proper re-release that will once again have dance floras twisted inside out and back to front. There is a freaky future menace to the paranoid synth and bumping drums of 'Raspmutal' before 'Down Turn' spins out into the cosmos on icy electro rhythms. Slowing things down for some stoned inward reflection is the gorgeous downtempo cut 'Fullow Street' before 80s synths bring retro charm to the cinematic electro of 'Process.'

Passarani

Luke Vibert

Olrando Voorn

Valerio Della Notte