HANS BOUFFMYHRE - Goodbye Anxiety

Very young and Scottish, vaguely blond and brash. On the homepage of his official website you'll find, in huge letters, the line: "A young man with a worrying obsession for techno music". Born around twenty years ago near Glasgow, Stephen Gorrie developed an all-consuming passion for techno music while still a teenager, organizing in 2006 a party called Sleaze that featured, among others, artists of the calibre of Andrew Weatherall, Funk D'Void and Extrawelt. Not content with that, the young man started producing music himself, on top of launching a digital label called Sleaze Records, going on to release his own work through some of the most interesting labels in the scene.

The material Gorrie has produced, at just 24, is staggering in both quantity and, above all, quality. His is a skeletal brand of techno, classic and iron-fisted in cut, shaped with controlled, dazzling flourishes, underpinned by a deep feel for the beat and a vision squarely aimed at club-floor abandon. Listening to the tracks on his debut "Goodbye Anxiety", released on Harthouse Mannheim, you get the feeling of sitting at the table of a city club that's been playing techno for decades, proud to offer pure, true music, untouched by trends or genre posturing, vivid and visceral. Austere tracks, beats cut by expert hands, impenetrable tangles, jugular-deep jabs and erotic sweat.

Ten compositions built with complex, excessive development, where melody rarely gives way to the march of rhythm, revealing the artist's hardcore spirit, capable of laying bare the roots of a music too often smothered in suffocating frills. While a choice like this may well shut out those not drawn to the primal beat, this record will delight anyone craving authenticity, especially those searching for the origins of techno music.

Faced with such a compact, homogeneous monolith, singling out individual tracks loses all meaning; a work like this is best experienced immersed in headphones at a good volume, while it loses value in a casual, open living-room listen, given the low-end content that doesn't translate well on most common stereo systems.

Clear terms make for lasting friendships. Anyone looking for avant-garde digressions or variations on the theme should steer well clear; for everyone else, and especially for dancefloor animals, this record will be an obsession that gets under your skin.

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08/12/2011