Porter Ricks

"Biokinetics": behind a title that seems to suggest biological references, a world of scientific ideas applied to music, lies one of the most intriguing albums of European electronic music from the Nineties, and even before that, one of the most singular creative collaborations of its era. Behind such a striking choice one can appreciate a project that weds mother Jamaica to the United States and a newly reunified Germany, oceanic flows to human mechanics, rhythmic rigour to atmospheric escape. Above all, thirty years on from its first release, one can find one of the foundational moments of dub-techno as a whole, a record that still today never stops revealing the full potential of one of the most explored and revisited genres in the entire club universe. It's therefore necessary to go back to 1996, to try to absorb the moods that shaped the development of one of the cornerstones of the Chain Reaction catalogue.

Following the fall of the Wall in November 1989, the situation in Berlin evolved rapidly. Week after week, month after month, the newly reunited capital became a privileged laboratory for the most varied and unimaginable electronic explorations. While it's true that as early as July of that same year West Berlin had already hosted the first Love Parade celebrating electronic music and its extraordinary potential, the post-fall scenario opened up to endless possibilities, encouraged as it was by a state of semi-anarchy that made it extremely easy to squat abandoned buildings and organise illegal raves. A furnace ceaselessly smelting metals, searching for the most unusual alloys to forge: it's in this fervent climate, in this feverish techno-utopia, that an encounter took place destined to write fundamental chapters of the German Nineties.

Born from the meeting between Moritz Von Oswald, who had by then moved to Berlin and was working as a producer for the label of the same name associated with the Tresor nightclub, and Mark Ernestus, owner of the Hard Wax record shop, the Basic Channel project was born in 1993, and with it the label of the same name. Within just a few years, and using a variety of monikers, the duo conceived a genuine revolution within the techno world, forging a risky yet highly effective fusion between the slowed-down tempos of Jamaican dub, with its deep reverbs and hypnotic basslines, and the Detroit sound devised by the celebrated trio Atkins-May-Saunderson. By giving weight to the atmosphere lurking behind the nervous energy, and by allowing room and possibility for obstinacy and repetition, the pair promoted an entirely new language, irresistible in its rhythmic potential and rich in an evocative quality that had until then been left in the background. In very short order, imitators and admirers would pick up on Basic Channel's insights and spread the gospel of dub-techno far and wide.

This is the point where the full instinct of the Von Oswald-Ernestus pairing comes to the fore. Aware that stretching the label's output ad libitum after the first 12"s and compilations would only dilute the strength of its message, in 1995 they suspended releases and launched a new distribution vehicle, through which to spread the projects of like-minded artists. Launched that same year, Chain Reaction became the preferred conduit for some of the most compelling and significant moments in all of 90s dub-techno, if not entire careers outright (Monolake being the most striking example). And it's here that the Porter Ricks adventure begins: itself the fruit of a meeting between two decidedly different creative minds, it brought together Thomas Köner, who for some years had been devoted to glacial ambient-drone productions, and Andy Mellwig, a sound engineer who had also worked at Dubplates & Mastering, founded by Basic Channel themselves to obtain masters up to their exacting standards. With all the expertise needed to handle sound, and a firm grip on atmosphere that had to be reckoned with, the two embarked on a run of 12"s with which to bring their own idea of techno music to life. A few seasons later, "Biokinetics" would sum up that vision in eight "easy" movements.

Far more than a mere compilation (for the occasion the duo included three unreleased tracks alongside five previously issued ones), the work offered by the duo, the first release for Chain Reaction to be pressed on CD, stands as the purest demonstration of the power of imagery applied to sound, of the ability of timbres and rhythms to create settings and suggest spaces even without the aid of melody. In a game of mechanics, patterns and repetitions handled with surgical precision, the vessel steered by Porter Ricks (named after a character from the "Flipper" series) sets a course for oceans of vapour, trails of smoke, seeking out immensity within the ungraspable. Even more than in Basic Channel's mighty rhythmic voyages, where conceptual abstraction reigns supreme, the German duo's biokinetics vibrate on a higher quantum plane, letting the spectrum of their ideas open onto a conception of atmosphere and suggestion that goes beyond pure rhythmic design. From the Berlin of the cosmic couriers of the previous two decades, the baton passes to those who pick up their legacy in light of the technological updates of the Nineties.

Image, sound, setting: with just a few essentials, Porter Ricks' expressiveness takes flight from the very first bars, revealing its full evocative character and inherent dynamism. Against all appearances, the muffled pulses of "Port Gentil", barely rippled by a deep bass marking every beat, become the experimental testing ground for an incessant ebb and flow of currents and swells, sonic waves crashing against the rocks of imagination, before the distant echo of a train pushes the beats forward, ready to plunge us into new, boundless landscapes. Here already lies the subtle art of Köner and Mellwig, the iron-fisted control over progression, over the tiny changes that open and close segments of a track: iron and steam become the image of a kinetics of life that isn't merely a clever metaphor for movement on the dancefloor, but rather the very vision of opposites that clash and ultimately converge, exalting the beat as much as the space between them. In this constant interplay of push and release, it's another mechanical pattern that fuels the propulsion of "Nautical Dub", but its more nervous, hallucinated edge never reaches the bombastic grandeur of so much techno of the same era, preferring instead to stir a more filigreed movement, the perfect setting for light synthetic accents ready to plunge into the relentless bass at the bottom.

Amid this proliferation of port and maritime references, marking out points and routes across an ocean that never rests, turbulence is of course inevitable. "Port Of Call" is all gashes and grooves of electronics, almost irritating the far sturdier beat that underpins it, but it's easy, within the organised chaos animating the surface loops, to glimpse a deeper unease, a black abyss that could unravel all the swagger above. And so the pairing "Port Of Nuba" – "Nautical Nuba", starting from the same rhythmic sketch, distorts repeatedly, like waves piling ever higher upon one another before the final crash. And yet there's never a sense of definitive collision, there's always the manus longa of the duo transforming, folding, ultimately refracting the same base to obtain two completely opposite effects (it's hard not to glimpse the dark shroud surfacing beneath the loops of "Nautical Nuba", a spatiality that, in the busier context of its portside sister, never quite emerges). And if "Nautical Zone" were meant to serve as the closing counterpart to "Port Gentil", it does so by even venturing a curious micro-melodic hypothesis, one that creeps into the underlying train and casts a diffuse light over the whole journey.

Movement, however convulsive or instinctive, lies at the heart of any project aimed at the clubs. While it's true that from the following decade onward there would be a gradual narrowing of what was deemed suitable for the dancefloor, Porter Ricks' "Biokinetics" was nonetheless born and bred to exalt movement, that deeply human impulse to follow a rhythm. Tellingly, it's the two title tracks, the most experimental moments on a record already far removed from any trend, that decree this most subversively. On one hand, the first movement lets the body's cadences simmer on a low flame, twisting sinister synthetic streaks in a play of asymmetries that, more than twenty years later, one wouldn't hesitate to call post-club. On the other, the second's extremely slow sonic swells, with those submerged dubs advancing inexorably, give a sense of Köner's great stature as a sound designer, of his relentless way of creating rhythm even amid the thickest fog.

Distributed in an aluminium case that would become a sadly famous trademark (a casing too hard for the disc inside, often causing it to break), later reissued several times, including on vinyl, over the last fifteen years (Type in 2012 with an extraordinary cover with a Herbert-esque feel, Mille Plateaux in 2021), "Biokinetics" makes its exceptional contribution to a simply magical decade for German electronic music (that same year saw the debut of Wolfgang Voigt, but it's also the era of the debuts of DJ Hell, of Mouse On Mars, of labelmates Monolake), pushing the dub-techno idiom to unimagined extremes. Its waves would spread with all due calm throughout the 2000s, showing the way to all those seeking collateral suggestions from their techno. But it would be with the dawn of the 2010s, and the rise of Modern Love, that Porter Ricks' lesson would find its logical landing point, and reveal the full force of its legacy. Beyond the banks of smoke, beyond the swell of the sea, pulses that taste of life, for all those who have understood them.

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31/05/2026