One of my oldest and closest friends, the venerable Ethan Braun, proclaimed upon first hearing it that Ständigen Gewäsch was “what Steve Reich wished he could do” - I don’t know if I can really accept such high praise, but I can certainly repeat it here, to let the reader know what others have said.
I’ve honestly had a bit of a hard time with techno, despite how much of it I’ve made. The “musician” in me felt like it was too easy, everything at the same tempo, same time signature, hyper-adherent to the genre signifiers. The romantic in me found little humanity to wrestle with, the obvious qualities all being highly mechanized and impersonal.
I first heard Basic Channel in 2008, after reading something about them in an interview with Sean Booth of Autechre - apparently I needed someone “legit” to tell me it was ok to get into techno. Shortly thereafter, I was told by a guy I was working with to get Gas’s Königsforst and Burger/Ink’s Las Vegas, since I liked the Basic Channel BCD comp I’d found on Soulseek. I loved all three, and suddenly felt like an absolute fool for having discounted techno...
I soon got into stuff like Vladislav Delay, Pole, the other Chain Reaction albums, and the SF scene of dudes like Kit Clayton, Sutekh and Twerk. Vlad’s The Four Quarters and Kit Clayton’s Nek Sanalet really hit me, and those remain perennial favourites; the rest of it just seemed “ok” in comparison to the stuff that had opened those doors for me. When I heard BCD-2, I didn’t like it, and still don’t, as it felt like an intrusion of the Berghain nonsense I’d found so happily absent on the first volume.
So, this album, as is maybe obvious, is my attempt at removing everything I dislike from the techno idiom, leaving only what I find properly numinous about it. These are sounds I would happily hear forever.
Cover art by Michael Keusch.
I’ve honestly had a bit of a hard time with techno, despite how much of it I’ve made. The “musician” in me felt like it was too easy, everything at the same tempo, same time signature, hyper-adherent to the genre signifiers. The romantic in me found little humanity to wrestle with, the obvious qualities all being highly mechanized and impersonal.
I first heard Basic Channel in 2008, after reading something about them in an interview with Sean Booth of Autechre - apparently I needed someone “legit” to tell me it was ok to get into techno. Shortly thereafter, I was told by a guy I was working with to get Gas’s Königsforst and Burger/Ink’s Las Vegas, since I liked the Basic Channel BCD comp I’d found on Soulseek. I loved all three, and suddenly felt like an absolute fool for having discounted techno...
I soon got into stuff like Vladislav Delay, Pole, the other Chain Reaction albums, and the SF scene of dudes like Kit Clayton, Sutekh and Twerk. Vlad’s The Four Quarters and Kit Clayton’s Nek Sanalet really hit me, and those remain perennial favourites; the rest of it just seemed “ok” in comparison to the stuff that had opened those doors for me. When I heard BCD-2, I didn’t like it, and still don’t, as it felt like an intrusion of the Berghain nonsense I’d found so happily absent on the first volume.
So, this album, as is maybe obvious, is my attempt at removing everything I dislike from the techno idiom, leaving only what I find properly numinous about it. These are sounds I would happily hear forever.
Cover art by Michael Keusch.