Phill Prince
Pleasure Playground / Elegancia Retro

Alec Falconer releases the first ep on his new flatship Ba Dum Tish label : a 4-track banger. Usual recipe, an assortment of synth, drums and bass to brighten your day.

Latest record off the Kalahari production line comes courtesy of a real one. Klon Dump in the building, moving like a madman across four barrelling tech house scorchers.Part-producer, part-engineer and a long time co-conspirator of A Colourful Storm’s Moopie. Better known to some under the alias Mark, but always surefire for some serious dancefloor potency. Doubters, look no further-this is another demonstration of his mastery.Big with the radiant stabs, even bigger on the earworm groove. Ploughing the furrow of tough, direct but deft as the Klon Dump faithful will have come to expect by now. Proper belters. Always flexing outstanding rhythmic ingenuity, whether it’s hardcore hybridity as Mark or the tech house innovation shown here. If anything in life is certain, it’s that a KD record will lay down some serious torque.There’s also an off-kilter playfulness that kinda feels reminiscent of T+++’s ‘Space Pong’ or Fiedel and Errorsmith’s MMM project. Another ace in the hole from the Antipodean shapeshifter.

2024 RepressWriting about techno is quite difficult without falling into cliché: there are only so many ways that you can say something about a music whose core elements are forged on deliberate repetition; where real talent is attributed to those who can find the perfect groove where nothing needs added or subtracted to hold the listener’s attention for upwards of five minutes.Such tracks are the hallmark of Tresor’s catalogue, and this joy in repetition can be found in works from Detroit, Berlin, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and more. And it is through this lens that Parisian artist, UFO95, focuses his output, resulting in Backward Improvement, an EP that sits perfectly in the spectrum of techno found in the Tresor chronology.The title itself makes an abstract reference to the influence of the classics of the genre, inspiring him to take a distinct less-is-more approach to production for this collection of stripped-down yet unrelenting techno chiselled from the live set which has fixed UFO95 as one of the next holdfasts for the future of the scene.Perhaps it is the fact the UFO95 only performs live that had led to such crisp and focussed studio productions.; each of the tracks showcase the artist’s burgeoning talent for creating the essential foundations of techno; perfect, looping, instinctual grooves that are counterbalanced by an apprehensive tension from off-key tones.Backward Improvement marks the addition of a new name in the list of techno’s best producers and proves that while the genre may now be in its 40th year there are yet sonic explorations to be made and variations that are worth unearthing.