Sunday 14 June 2009

Roderick Fox - Splendid

After dissing minimal techno a few posts back I thought it'd be nice and hypocritical to then go ahead and enthuse about some here. "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/I am large, I contain contradictions"*

The best minimal was never really a genre in its own right in my book… and so it is here. Over the three mixes, what you basically have is bouncy, slightly wonkified deep house (Original Mix), deep techno (Nidecker Mix) and mellow, tech-y prog (Stefanowitz Mix). I'm feeling the Original Mix the most, unsurprisingly, but Nidecker's mix is pretty fine too.

What you DON'T have is wanky self-indulgent post-IDM 'electronica' thoroughly devoid of melody and funk, and full instead of nasty grating synth noises repeated at 11-second intervals for the next six minutes. THAT'S the kind of minimal I was slating before. Just so's we're clear.

Oh, and the really good news? The track is free to download! Hurray! So go grab it from the Strom site here.

*That's from Song Of Myself  by Walt Whitman, don't you know? Come for the house reviews, stay for the American 19th Century epic poetry.

About the label: It's on Strom Netlabel. I know nothing about parent label Strom but from their website I gather it's a Dutch techno label, which would explain that. Anyway Strom Netlabel is in their words "a net label with some deeper stuff and it's free"… what more do you need to know?

No comments:

Post a Comment