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Helena Hauff: Actio Reactio

Actress chooses sagely who to put out on his Werkdiscs imprint. The former home for all kinds of weird abstractions of the late ‘00s UK bass era now channels carefully towards the rhythmically straightforward, yet head-wise dance music territory. After singles such as Lukid’s frosty, melody infused This Dog Can Swim and Moiré’s heavy-hitting, amphetamine dazed Never Sleep, Hamburg’s 25-year-old Helena Hauff takes the lead with Actio Reactio, which contains two fairly long acts for the sake of analog techno (they collectively clock around nineteen minutes), and a short, outro-like beatless theme.

Listening to the title track, whilst watching the video, you can immediately detect that there is a reminiscent aspect of the music. Of course, we can see almost everywhere that revisiting the late ‘80s is a favoured concept by dance music artists from the underground to the mainstream, yet there are only a few who can apply the idea in order to make something new instead of something already existing. Hauff’s music falls in the former category, and it makes Actio Reactio worthy of your attention: comprehensive snythwork and contorted percussions take shape and vary in 10 minutes mid-tempo.

The dangerously acidic Break Force is the vinyl’s other lengthy piece, running on a faster speed, being less diversedand more aligned. The music never gets tired: after ten or twenty minutes, both tracks have enormous power and don’t implore for a change. The closing Micro Manifesto distils the essence of the single: cacophony of noisy synths progress to a crescendo, which sadly ends after three minutes, presumably due to the limits of the physical format. Actio Reactio is a strong debut for the artist, and a fine addition to Werkdiscs notable discography, which seems to aim for new goals by introducing talented newcomers in house and techno’s domain.