Thursday techno trilogy with: soundslikeLANG, Defset, and Dan Wilson #Techno #MelodicTechno #House
Three flavours of techno, each gradually getting harder, for your pre-Friday pleasure from soundslikeLANG, Defset, and Dan Wilson.
soundlikeLANG is Dave Lang from Los Angeles. He describes his work as, “a brand of emotive-house music which invigorates the listener’s nostalgia.” I’m certainly in the market for a bit of living in the past after this morning’s Ukraine news.
Back When… is the first track on the Midnight And the City EP. It opens with a bit of spiritual chanting before going for a sort of naturalistic shamanistic vibe. Perhaps a bit like Deep Forest from days gone by. This is then added to by piano and chants. But there’s more here than whimsy. The beats are sharp and crisp and give this a perfectly textured club feel, albeit a club in a forest with a fallen leaf floor. Grab your acorns and get to it.
To the UK and seaside resort Brighton for Defset. He’s new but clearly immersed in all shades of electronic music. There’s breakbeats, spacious dubstep and IDM trickery on display here. No idle wallowing in nostalgia here. The sounds may be analogue but the approach is super modern.
New track All The Room And No Space is follow-up to his debut album Proximity (October 2021). And it’s utterly fabulous. Defset explains “This began as a little ambient melodic jam on my Prophet 6 and Atlantis” adding, “It was just the nice distorted pad and melody weaving in and out, then I recorded it and played it live noting “I brought in this dirty great breakbeat and the track took off. I then spent a few months trying to recreate what I did live! I think I eventually got there.”
All The Room And No Space opens with a long anticipatory drone before beats and flashes of synths gradually build into something utterly anthemic. If that’s not enough the peak is the moment to introduce the dirty great breakbeat that he talks about. It’s a bit of a monster. And yet there’s such skill in managing both the impact of the sound and also in not overwhelming the track. You get carried along on this huge wave of emotion. There’s not quite a hook and yet it dares you to hum along.
This is good enough to appear on an Orbital album. It’s that high quality. Get your own room and make some space for this track.
Staying in the UK but moving a long way north we have Dan Wilson from Dunfermline, Scotland. Here’s his latest track Estuary. And it’s an acid monster.
Of Estuary, he says it’s, “a hypnotic techno track with an acid baseline on TB03 hardware.” I can confirm this is correct in all regards. What that forgets is that this is five minutes of acid pleasure / punishment. There’s no real messing about. This starts as it means to go on with a hardcore acid line. THat’s accompanied pretty soon after by some big doof doof beats.
It’s not all head battering stuff. In among the acid and the beats is a serpentine synth line that gives the hardness of the other sounds some sort of subtle relief. It balances things out such that this is a pleasure of a ride, albeit one from which there is no escape.
ACID TED 