Rene Reiter, Black.Art, Maxx – Carbon Audio 05 (Carbon Audio)

Defqon 3 is a tale of rising panic, with a subterranean, echo-soaked kick supplemented by siren motifs and a truly terrifying central riff. There is an epic, slowly unfolding quality to it as well. Imagine a really hard-assed remix of a Sabres of Paradise tune circa 1996 and you get the idea.

Defqon 5, meanwhile, is a showstopper, up there with the best of the year. A magnesium flare, a wired and wide-eyed blast of utter madness, it starts hard and fast then around the halfway mark throws off its kimono and with a synthesised scream goes bonkers, chucking riffs around and unleashing some of the best and most brutal acid known to man. It’s the kind of track that makes you grin; that makes you do that whoosh thing with your mouth; that reminds why you got into Acid Techno in the first place.

Over to next door, and if there was an exact point where industrial techno met the wide-eyed riff-frenzy of acid techno, Black.Art’s Rust would be it, a lovely old-school flavour to this track. With Maxx and Rene Reiter’s VD galloping us past the finish line for what is an exceptional, nay, essential release.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Carbon Audio online

Zenith Distribution page (including samples to download)

Deuperium – Telemetry EP (Slime Recordings)

Late night,  early morning – who can tell? – Deuperium’s superb Telemetry EP makes a bid to colonise both. The brainchild of Northwich-based producer Matthew Lloyd – his debut, in fact – it’s an EP boasting album dynamics: a four-tracker that makes complete – arguably even more – sense when taken together.

Most EPs, for example, your common-or-garden EPs, would start with Why Not? with its 120 beats-per-minute, bossy, finger-wagging acid and electro stylings. This, after all, is the one you’d choose if you were browsing for play-out material on Beatport.

Not Deuperium. Lloyd is playing the long game, and Telemetry kicks off with Together, a distant cousin of Orbital’s The Box that triggers all kinds of minor-key loveliness, as though John Carpenter had composed an unused love theme for Escape From New York. Squiggles of acid gradually toughen up as the track progress, before it slides into Galaxy News, a gorgeous, drifting dream of a track that, if anything, is even more reflective.

And then – and only then – just when you’re in the mood for something a bit more hip-swinging, do you get Why Not?, and it’s great, and it’s followed by XOX Acid, which works the 303 in a downtempo Melbourne-sounding acid workout to see us to the door.

In all, this is a great release for Slime and, like I say, full marks for that track sequencing, which makes this a genuinely rewarding listen in its entirety. Here’s hoping an album is in the works.

Get it here: Juno Download

Dave Elyzium – Scraps EP (Hypnohouse Purple)

Scraps is a bracingly nasty slice of underground horror film scuzziness, with the vocal sample – something about blood – providing an eerie counterpoint to stark drums and a nagging, torture-chamber riff. The D’FunK Darktek Remix, is a skittering fractured take, as though the tune has been taken apart then reassembled by a horrible kid in a Punisher t-shirt, while Hypnohouse mainman John Rowe steers things in an altogether more rolling, almost Millsian direction with his Threshold remix, cleaning up the central riff and adding funky stabs. But for this gorehound, the final track on the EP, the Zombie in Progress Mix, in which the darkness of the original is filtered into a propulsive, filthily funky beast, is where it’s at. Wonderful stuff.

Cogs, Beans and The Machines – The Tramps Are Alright EP (Powertools909)

The novelty of Cogs Away!’s swear-heavy opening wears off pretty quickly, but you get the impression Cogs – that’s Ant and DDR, by the way – are aware of that, because once you’ve endured the swearing, it only makes the briefest of reappearances in the main body of the tune. Which is a doozy. Set off by the kind of kickdrum that scares pigeons out of rafters, you can almost sense the individual fingerprints of the artists involved: the cranky, determinedly oily low frequencies of DDR, the mad-eyed, OCD melodies we’ve come to expect from the Ant of Hazchem or Acid Jammer. Nevertheless, though there be acid here, Cogs feels like first and foremost a techno project, and unsurprisingly Klammerton with its frequent changes and lots of breaks, sounds like it could have come out on Powertools, while Twathammer will remind you late-90s Cluster. 303 makes a reappearance on the final track Flounce, meanwhile, which sweats in a big coat and stands on the sidelines glaring a thousand-yard stare, like the rest of the EP a tough, solidly constructed tune, built  to last.

MPIA3 – Ely EP (Avian)

From the fog-bound end of the street scuttles this acid release on Avian, previously on 12-inch and now on digital. And not so much released as on the run, hugging the walls, looking over its shoulder, a fumblesome mass of sweating hands and facial tics. Both are – for this blog at least – slow (128 and 127 BPM respectively), and both have kicks thick with grime that no amount of Swarfega will shift. First up, Ely’s acid line starts off quite politely until the halfway mark, when it dissolves into full-blown psychosis and distorts off the matrix altogether. Meanwhile, whether track two Squatter’s Dog is intended as an homage to Rozzer’s Dog, only MPIA3 (aka Truss) can say*, but the fact remains that, like Ely, it’s stripped back and jittery, pairing those raw drums with a somewhat more restrained but still gratifyingly paranoid 303.

Get it from: Juno Download

* He has since said

Osmo – Osmo Exclusive 03

One of the founders of Scythe Squadron, Polish producer Osmo (Tomasz Osmański) has also been releasing via Bandcamp, where you’ll find this utterly essential twosome, Osmo Exclusive 03.

Informed as much by bass music’s claustrophobia and dark techno’s shadowy corners as it is by the London sound, 03 doesn’t so much roll as growl. Fuck Your Lies takes its time building, with torture chamber echo effects giving way to a chest-pressing bass riff, eerie bells and an indistinct vocal, before dropping out at the halfway mark, breaking down and resolving for an intense, speedy climax. Follow that, Mr Osmański. And, in Techno Generator, he does. After an industrial intro worthy of JG Thirlwell comes an assortment of dark and sadistic motifs, breaks and bleeps adding to a general air of controlled chaos. Hail the drum work. Hail the final acid freak-out that takes us to the bridge. Stunning.

Get it from: Osmo at Bandcamp

Tanz Organelle – Series 7 EP (Hand Made Acid)

Beautifully produced, just as you’d expect from a man of Jay Brown’s pedigree, Series 7 harks back to Sheet One-era Plastikman, over-rubbed for the warehouse set. On Filterfuck (135 BPM) cavernous drums fill all available space, thick and immense, and growing more intense and cloying, while a simple, contrasting acid line scans left and right. Likewise Blue Alert (131 BPM), which operates at a more gentle, but no less ominous throb, and again has the feel of empty industrial space, with echoing static pulses a counterpoint to a more insistent 303 line. M876 (132 BPM), meanwhile, has the brightest kick as well as crunching sound effects that resolve into a terrific riff and squabbling acid line, my only complaint being that the riff isn’t developed a bit more. In all, fantastic stuff, deep, rich and forbidding with more than enough bang for your buck.

Get it from: Beatport

Justin E – Nailz EP (Viral Outbreak))

Cat no: VOD 016
Get it from: Juno

The drawback of being a lazy bastard and not posting since August – August! – is that I miss covering some great tunes, but this one I’m not letting slip through the net, no sir. Nailz you probably already know. At 146 BPM it’s just the rickety-ticket for taking proceedings up a notch; those cantering drums don’t do it any harm, and the main riff, hard and metallic, is as funky as it is scary,  something of a Justin E trademark. Red Herring kicks my arse from here until next week — again with the scary riffs, yo! Meanwhile, Psycosis and Chimera are just that little bit deeper, little bit darker. And then, woah, Outpost, easily the most brooding and soundtracky thing I’ve heard from Mr Edwards, a nightmarish wash of oxidisation – peeling, tarnished, a future already in decay. Awesome stuff.

Tassid, A.P. & Josh Inc – Impact UK 001 (Impact UK)

Impact UK is a new techno label from A.P. – and would you look at that? The last three reviews on here have been predominantly acid producers making techno cuts. Could there be something in the air?

Tassid’s Pest Infest (148 BPM) is typically fast and has a grotty bassline underpinning a filthy kick and marvellous, clattery percussion, like an orchestra of demonic children thrashing away at dustbin lids. A vocal gives way to itchy, agitated riffage and the end result is glorious filth of the first order. Highly recommended. Suck My Stomp Box (144 BPM), meanwhile, is pure metallic funk, thundering away like an explosion at an oil refinery. My absolute favourite, however, is Toilet Pervert (145 BPM). Here, liquid drums are almost perfectly weighted, then come ravey horns, which are soon stretched and mutated into cackling, leering shapes, speeded up and slowed down. Here is a place where sounds start as one thing then end up another, creeping in and out of a mix that’s gratifyingly busy and full of little tweaks and events, but not overloaded, while a vocal sample from Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised adds texture and also some unexpected gravitas. How it ended up with the title Toilet Pervert is one only A.P. and Josh Inc. can answer, but it’s an ace tune, and fully deserving of this, horror queen, Linnea Quigley with a chainsaw.

Get it from: 909

Silex – Twisted Turmoil EP (Anecdote)

Silex is the new project from Fil Devious and Justin E, who together have been mining a love of horror movies and techno riffery for this debut EP, a more sinister, and snarling thing you couldn’t hope to find.

Coulrophobia, (145 BPM) then. No, I didn’t know what it meant either. The fear of clowns apparently: their cadaverous white faces, the painted-on grin that hides what they’re really thinking, which is that they want to skin you alive then stuff your body into the crawlspace. Accordingly, the Silex take opens with a clean kick, like the insistent drip-drip of an underground pool, but then comes a nasty, bubbling bassline, and then a set of chords that stare at you red-eyed from inside a storm drain. It hits its groove and stays there, dark, but without resorting to the industrial sound that’s getting a bit wearing elsewhere, intense and subtly layered. Fluff Buzz (143 BPM) is just as good. Coulrophobia’s sci-fi twin, it blasts away with trippy, swirling effects and nagging melodies, while Touch Tone Trip (145 BPM) breaks out a sample from The Thing halfway through and teases you with a ghostly 303 that might not even be there. Superb stuff.

Get it from: Juno