What Eric Cloutier’s debut LP, My Friend The Abyss is categorically not, is an abrupt leap into album-making. Cloutier has spent decades refining one of the most uncompromising DJing philosophies you will find anywhere in the scene. Obsessive digging and boundless patience have always defined his work behind the decks, and this record is a long awaited result of that mentality. Yet despite the years of anticipation surrounding the album and numerous releases on his label Palinoia, it is anything but the collection of hypnotic techno tools we might have expected. The listener is rewarded with an experience that continually pushes beyond the expectations attached to his name.
Opening cut Electrophoresis is a four to the floor prog-flavoured banger, all wriggling acid lines constantly splitting and reforming around a driving groove, creating a kaleidoscopic, wormhole diving sensation. Into the particle splitter we go. It’s probably the album’s most overtly dancefloor-focused moment, but even here nothing quite sits still, the arrangement continually mutating as it burrows into the old grey matter.
Then immediately we’re confronted with one of the biggest surprises on the record, arriving in the shape of the twisting, writhing, snakelike Ligrothism. Here, rather than some straight-up techno, Cloutier shakes a cocktail of fractured drum & bass-adjacent rhythms, rushing snares, urgent percussion and high-voltage synth work. It’s a bold and wild left turn from the work we’re used to hearing from Eric, but mercifully it doesn’t feel like genre tourism – we get the same attention to detail and hypnotic sensibilities characteristic of his other work.
After that intensity, Hävittää almost acts, again, aptly, as a sort of reset. The tempo settles down into something closer to sparse, dub-inflected house, where deep bass, clipped chord stabs and precisely sculpted percussion are all given ample room to breathe. The swing of the groove is exquisite – release, tension and irresistible movement are found through the deceptively tricky act of impactful percussion sequencing, while slowly twisting spirals of acid drift through the mix before disappearing again. Dreamy deepness found here.
Seishinryoku (精神力) translates as “mental strength” or “strength of spirit”, and does actually feel like the emotional, ambient core of the album. Emerging from layers of hiss and crackle, the track slowly blooms into luminous ambient chords before dissolving back into distortion. It feels like a lot more than an ambient interlude, thanks to particularly striking production that allows texture and melody to coexist amongst layers of harmony and chord progression.
After this, the broken-beat energy returns on Celeste, where twitching basslines, rushing hats provide the bedrock for decaying acid phrases that repeatedly nudge their way in trippy little molehills to the surface, before receding again. There’s a restless quality to this one, the track constantly slips into unexpected corners, all whilst shimmering synth lines drift overhead.
Desassossego drags the album back towards darker techno territory. Distorted vocal fragments, tribal percussion and relentless hats generate a mounting sense of psychological pressure, of creeping unease and ominous undertones. But, as ever, it evolves slowly and hypnotically, never relying on the ‘big moment’ or cheap production tricks.
The closing Daiku (大工) is crafted with delicate care from slow-moving kicks, cavernous space and alien synth figures that seem to coil endlessly around one another. Rather than ending with a dramatic climax, Cloutier assembles a final, introspective soundscape, allowing the album to dissolve gently into shadow.
Throughout My Friend The Abyss, Cloutier repeatedly refuses the predictable. Anyone expecting seven functional techno tracks may initially be surprised by excursions into ambient music, broken rhythms and dubby minimalism, but those stylistic shifts all feel coherent and natural thanks to the commitment to the craft poured into the album. For someone whose reputation has been built on immaculate curation, the album demonstrates that the same obsessive attention to detail extends to production away from the dancefloor.
His accompanying live mix recorded at Tresor Berlin, mixed (on vinyl of course) across three turntables, serves as the perfect companion piece. Where the album offers an introspective portrait of Cloutier as producer, the mix is a reminder of why he’s long been regarded as one of techno’s great selectors. Utterly slamming, yet deeply hypnotic and constantly evolving, this slow-burning narrative weaves together a tapestry of dub techno, psychedelic house and heads-down 4/4 business into a seamless journey.
Interview by Will Patterson
There’s never been a better adage than “quality over quantity.” I’m ten years into the label and have only done 12 total releases, and I think that should say enough.
Hi Eric and thanks for taking the time to speak to us, and congratulations on the album. Let’s start by talking about Palinoia. Considering you had been DJing for more than 20 years (if I have that right), what circumstances or inspiration led you to starting your own imprint?
Thank you for the invite and chat! More than 20 is correct – somewhere around 27yrs of playing tunes in some capacity – so…seen a lot in my days so far. The shortest version of this answer is that I’ve always wanted to have my own imprint to push those whose music I found that I felt needed a nudge from someone whom the populous considers a true selector and give the world some unknown names to dig in on.
But the more accurate version, which includes the aforementioned, is more than that, because of my relentless digging for music daily, I found myself finding less and less new music that was interesting or fulfilling to me, so I decided to just create my own tracks as well as push the ones that I think need to be heard.
What are the guiding principles behind the label? How do you go about curation, commission, production etc. Do you have any non-negotiables when it comes to the artists you approach or the tracks they submit?
There’s never been a better adage than “quality over quantity.” I’m ten years into the label and have only done 12 total releases, and I think that should say enough. Obviously, my selection of tracks will be based solely on my standards, but I do spend some time shuffling the track order and thinking about how the final product will be received by those who buy and play the releases.
I’m also prone to some suggestions within the tracks, or making some notes on what may or may not work or needs some changing, but mostly the producers send me their best tunes, and we have a proper dialogue about things the entire time. I do get a pretty large amount of submissions in the demo department, and I aim to listen to and reply to all of them, but if I were to spend as much time on the demos as I do on hunting for things for my collection and to use in my sets, I don’t know if I’d get anything done throughout the day – hah!
It’s (hopefully) fair to say that your foray into production has come fairly late into your time in the scene. How was the transition from moving from primarily DJing into production? For someone so committed to being discerning and considered in digging for quality, did that add an extra pressure to your production process? Or was that deep knowledge more of a strength you could draw upon?
I started producing music very casually when I was still in Brooklyn as some friends and I shared a studio space and I could go there whenever I wanted and plug in and make some noise, but nothing really came from that adventure, but it did get me going with thinking about track creation more and more. After moving to Berlin, however, I had options to contribute to V/A’s or do a remix and I said “yes” and decided to push myself and that really got things going much further.
Deciding to lean in on producing more did come with its own set of internal struggles. I’m OCD and a perfectionist, and the carry-over of my record digging into the mindset of being satisfied with my productions was a hard one. I told myself early on that I never want to go on Discogs in 20 years and look at my output and go “ooof, that was a rough one” to any of my tracks.
My Discogs of a brain does complicate things, for sure. It takes me ages to finish anything, for starters, but I’ll spend most of my time in the arrangement part, fiddling with minutiae that probably nobody will notice, but is what makes it complete to me. Unintentionally, in the process, I rarely DJ my own tracks out because I’ve heard them SO many times by this point that I just don’t want to hear them again…at least for a while.
"I knew the album had to be a full representation of myself, which meant my standards and quality control were at the front, but it had to be “Eric Cloutier” sonically, as well."
Well, building from that, obviously My Friend The Abyss is a debut LP not only for the label but for yourself, did you feel any extra pressure in living up to the reputation Palanoia and yourself has?
The most difficult and unforgiving critic of me is me – full stop. I’ll beat myself up for the most finite of flub in a DJ set that nobody notices until I point it out, and me pointing it out means it wasn’t an issue to anyone but myself so…ouroboros. I’ve bandied about an album for a comical amount of time – I think I mention it in my RA podcast from ten years ago – so there was a mountain of pressure on myself for this one. I knew it had to be a full representation of myself, which meant my standards and quality control were at the front, but it had to be “Eric Cloutier” sonically, as well.
Though I use techno as the cornerstone of everything I do, I have my house side, my dub side, my ambient side, my wiggly psychedelic tech house side, etc…how do I cram it all in?! The original concept was 15 tracks, and I put the kibosh on that real fast. Ten seemed like a good number, but then the editing process had me feeling like I was forcing things in as a means to complete the track count. I might regret something, which circles back to the previous question of not wanting to hate any of my music down the road, so I walked away from it all for a week and chose the seven that I did and felt that was the best representation of me that I could do without needless bloat merely for posturing or optics.
Talk to me about the album itself, let’s start with the production process. What led you to feeling that this was the right time to start working on the record? How did the project come about?
Catharsis is literally the only reason. I had an absolutely insane two years, a seemingly never-ending deluge of bad news and circumstance that would seem like it came from a Netflix miniseries, and I had to do something to redirect my dour, apocalyptic worldview into something constructive. I would work in fits and starts with no real consistency or focus until just this new year, when suddenly everything really clicked, and I knuckled down ultra hard and banged out or completed the seven tracks on this EP in quick succession. Something was simmering inside of me, building in pressure and needing release, and I had to exorcise my depression, pain, anger, frustration, and malaise out of me in the way I knew I confidently could, and it’s via music.
An inner obit of my friends knows all of the stories, and the second I sent them the private link to the masters the outpouring of their emotions, not only for joy for me for finishing this project, but for hearing my struggles put to music in a means we can all share safely and communally. Like Aristotle posited, this was a mutual cleansing; a deeper understanding of what I was dealing with internally (as I often don’t share too much as a textbook introvert). And, much like every track I’ve made, few people actually spend the time to look up the words I’ve chosen to become the title – my curation doesn’t stop at just the music as there’s purpose to the name as well – but, as a nudge…those who know will understand even more, but even the new listener to my music will grasp another level just by a quick Google.
What narratives/moods guided the album? There’s a real journey through genre here which, considering your dedication to that dubby, deep house and techno sound, kind of caught me by surprise in a nice way – the ambient tracks in particular are really beautiful.
As mentioned, this was an outpouring of emotions and a release valve for an unimaginable level of stress. The underbelly of every track stemmed from something personal, with some cross-talk of my headspace between them due to the way I was working on the project overall. I legitimately wanted to challenge myself, which led me to learn some new things production wise along the way. I can also can stand tall knowing nothing presented is fake or disingenuous, especially because the album overall is probably not what anyone is expecting from me. The last thing I want to do is be predictable.
Talk us through the technical aspects of your production. Considering your dedication to DJing on vinyl and that almost minimal nature in terms of tech, what hardware/software are you using when it comes to production?
Art comes from within, and trying to outsource it or use some template that worked for somebody else means you’ve entirely lost control and you’re a co-pilot to your own creativity. There’s using tools and outside influence, and there’s feeling compelled to fit a narrative, and the latter I’ll never do. I get asked quite often what gear I have in my studio, but the truth is that I’m all in-the-box with everything and don’t own one synth or drum machine. This usually shocks people, which is a compliment in so many ways, because if I’m not using anything outboard and people think I am then I guess I’m doing something right with the way I make tracks.
I personally never really felt the need to buy something to produce, mostly because it slows me down, but also I already have one addiction, and it’s vinyl, so I don’t need to make my life even more expensive. But in general, usually I feel compelled to make a track because of something that piques my interest from another record, a curiosity to try and replicate something, and just experimenting, which eventually leads me to the start of a new track while also dissecting and experimenting with things in Ableton along the way. I also play with samples and loops constantly as they’re a good catalyst to get something going quickly, which is what I need; otherwise, I get frustrated and annoyed and just end up looking for new gems on Discogs instead.
"I’m going to stay the course I’ve always been on until it's not an option anymore and I have to return to the regular workforce, but knowing that I’m not caving to trends or faking it to keep my bills paid is what a younger generation needs to see these days."
What surprised you as you were producing the album? Did you learn anything about your process? Was it liberating or strange to move away from tracks orientated very much towards the dancefloor?
My studio style is very much “push buttons randomly and have happy accidents happen because of blind luck,” so…I learn something every time, but also have no idea how to explain it if asked. But, yes, overall, the whole thing was a lot of fun, if not frustrating and all-consuming at times. Taking a big swing and doing the jungle track, for example, was definitely a new approach, but that was actually the track that I made the fastest, probably because I wasn’t thinking about it as much as I do the techno ones.
Was this move conscious? Is there anything regarding the current state of the scene, club culture etc. that inspired this move towards, dare I call it introspection? Could you describe the album as a reaction to the way dance music culture has changed? Or is it simply a personal project and exploration of your own capabilities/inspirations?
A little of column A, a little of column B with this. Very much a personal project that I needed to achieve, but also making another stand of nonconformity with myself as an artist and just doing what I do without the concern of trying to leverage clout or something.
On the current state of the scene… you’re a self-confessed purist, someone who invests huge amounts of time into digging, curating and championing a certain sound and quality. How has the landscape changed for you over the long and short-term, what with the explosion of popularity in the ‘underground’, the shift towards algorithmic ‘content’, the reasons people go to clubs, exhibitionism etc.?
Its not a secret that the scene is in a very peculiar and unstable place these days, but the solution to the chaos isn’t going to come from the artist side of things, it has to be from the clubs and promoters having a come to Jesus realization that they’re looking at the ecosystem from the wrong angle – they’re chasing numbers and relying on metrics that have no relation to the community they’re trying to cultivate and sustain and are inadvertently exploiting and underestimating their customers’ intelligence and desire to be educated and nourished.
If people stand in a queue for seven hours and pay 40€ a head to be disappointed, why the hell is there any incentive to return? There’s not enough risk-taking these days, and the listless apathy filling their coffers with the lowest-hanging fruit is just becoming predictable, dull, and flaccid. If you think of it like movie trailers these days, they almost show you the entire plot of the movie in 60 seconds so you don’t really need to pay the entry fee. It’s becoming similar with the clubs – same lineups everywhere, and they’re not splitting the fucking atom up there. Producers are often taking the easy road these days as well. Functional, uncomplicated, entry-level things that do the work but don’t become earworms. To use another analogy, its driving on the expressway with cruise control on and not changing lanes – middle of the road, chuggin’ along.
The whole setup is a bit ass-backwards these days. There has always been this cycle of evolution that is again coming back around to orbit, especially with the “cool” genre or style these days, but the revolution is also getting faster and faster, and it’s impossible to keep track of it all at the end of the day. Tracks are intentionally made to feed this anticipation of the breakdown snare roll adrenaline rush, fed to us over and over by DJs that want an infinite amount of content generated for them by the audience in a Pavlovian feedback loop of call and response we’re forgetting even why we’re investing time and money into going out these days.
I grew up in a place where it was an escape and therapy to go to a party, being teleported and mesmerized by the DJ to forget about life’s problems and ignore time and space and just be free. Now there are a lot of times it doesn’t feel like the person playing really wants to be there.
Finally, what’s next for the label and yourself in this ever-shifting climate? What is there to be optimistic and excited about?
Survival of the fittest for sure – hahah. I really am hoping to push out a few more EPs of my own this year, as well as some more for Palinoia, but with the costs of everything going up across the board it makes running a vinyl imprint even more complicated financially. I’ve considered a digital-only sub-label to compensate for things a little, but haven’t fully gone that route yet. I’m going to stay the course I’ve always been on until it’s not an option anymore and I have to return to the regular workforce, but knowing that I’m not caving to trends or faking it to keep my bills paid is what a younger generation needs to see these days and not some ass kissery and purchased followers making things right, feeding the machine I’m clearly not impressed with these days.
All told, hopefully Perpetual Booty Grooves Vol.2 will be released before the end of the year on Palinoia, hopefully this amazing EP from Metapattern I have sitting here, and I’ll have some ambient stuff kicking around on some other labels. I’m cautiously optimistic of everything, but that’s been my vibe since I started in this scene. Hahah.
‘My Friend The Abyss’ is out on July 17 via Palinoia. Order a copy on Bandcamp.
Photography by Frankie Casillo
Eric CloutierPalinoiaAmbientBreakbeatDrum & BassHouseTechno