LAKE PEOPLE - Purposely Uncertain Field

With the overwhelming, noisy comeback of Aphex Twin last year, the road leading from Nineties electronica to the present day has definitively filled back up with traffic. The truth, if we're being honest, is that after the minimal ferment of the early 2000s, in the field of techno furthest removed from the dancefloor, traffic never really stopped flowing in that direction. But looking at the last five years, we can state with reasonable confidence that this is still (and above all) today, as much as or even more than the urban ferment (which, after having had "its own Aphex Twin" in Burial, seems to have slowly curled in on itself, exceptions that prove the rule aside), the leading expression of contemporary electronic music.

Let's pretend not to know that Lake People is the latest moniker, chronologically speaking, of German producer Martin Enke, aka Trickform, one of the many talents who made the mistake of jumping on the post-Basic Channel bandwagon during the minimal five-year stretch already mentioned, and ended up getting "trapped" there. What you'll find on "Purposely Uncertain Field" is a concentrate of what electronic music is today: soft, liquid IDM (Black Dog), steadily flowing dub currents (Moritz Von Oswald), that taste for melodic contamination that made cultured electronic music a hit with the hipster masses (Jon Hopkins). All of it forged and shaped with the skill of a craftsman who, perhaps, only lacked a bit of luck.

Thus, the emblematic opening of "Escape Velocity" sounds like it was torn straight out of a "Tranklements" or a "Borderland", the offspring of a stylistic revivalism that represents the basic substance of the contemporary scene. "Blackpoint" travels along the same tracks at a brisker pace, punctuated here and there by synthetic strings, as does "Illuminated", ridden à-la-Orbital and wrapped around acid squiggles never quite concentrated enough to actually corrode. This is precisely where the novelty, the evolution of the contemporary, lies: in the "cleansing" of every imperfection, every excess, in a calculation that is no longer about novelty but about an established method.

Elsewhere, echoes of that flourishing intelligentsia era make themselves felt more forcefully. Such is the case with the hyperspatial mantra of "Glease 29", the thoroughly Jamesian melancholy and ambient sensibility of "Distance", the melodic brio so dear to Mike Paradinas staged on "Lamb Shift", and the analogue mélange in the style of early Autechre simulated on "Bora" and "Orb". Past and present mix together, blur into one another, become indistinguishable. Retromania that is no longer retromania, as demonstrated by the thoroughly current manifestos "Drifting Red" and "Cooping", which is to say, what Nathan Fake and James Holden would put on if they were ever called in to play a lounge bar.

The belated breakthrough of a producer who's had the chops to spare for at least ten years. Further proof that, in these first decades of the 2000s - still so deeply tied to the vast legacy of the nineties - there's room even for those who back then would have been written off as finished.

Ride the wave of great music

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09/02/2015