"The album’s keys and beats stab the air like a strobe light, melding each track into a focused, engrossing concoction of piercing minimal techno and blown out ambient. The bass throbs like an earthquake, knocking you off your feet and keeping you glued to the floor with its relentless, inescapable propulsion."
There’s a comforting solitude that comes with dub techno and the microgenres that sprouted in its wake. The framework assembled in the early to mid 90s by the likes of Echospace and Basic Channel emphasised techno through heavy layers of reverb to make you feel stuck on a hypnotic, reality blurring repeat. With our drift away from social circles to lives dominated by screens, further accelerated by the pandemic, headphones and home stereos have become a gateway to another world. Dubby, ambient leaning techno has seen a revolution of sorts the past few years, with a new generation of producers applying a subdued sense of equal parts playfulness and dread to their work.
Lying somewhere between throwback sounds and a push into deeper, spacier territory is Sheffield’s Short Span. From the outset, Matthew Kent described his latest label as “dedicated to longer, dubbed out, ambient inspired and fluid tracks”. With releases from Mammo, Sa Pa, and Conna Haraway, Short Span’s first year dropped a slate of heavy hitting tracks. Spanning slow pulse ambient to cavernous dub techno drenched in syrupy audio effects, the Sheffield imprint quickly made its mark on the scene.
Coming on strong for the label is Denmark’s Picture, aka Natal Zaks, with their latest, ‘Eeeeeeee’. The album’s keys and beats stab the air like a strobe light, melding each track into a focused, engrossing concoction of piercing minimal techno and blown out ambient. The bass throbs like an earthquake, knocking you off your feet and keeping you glued to the floor with its relentless, inescapable propulsion.
Opener “Waaaaaaaa” breaks through the static to bring forth a driving, mutated rhythm that lies adjacent to the dancefloor but works best played loud on whatever device you’re using. Its minimal sensibility is undercut by subtle effects that course through your veins and blast your mind into infinity. Another entry with a prominent techno vibe is “Keeeeeee”, which is less primal and more dystopian science fiction. The percussion is buried in the mix, with an off-kilter exo-planetary melody taking center stage.
Tracks like “Heeeeeeee” and “Qeeeeeeee” are still rhythmic but offer up an eerie ambient soundscape that is tough to relax to yet they project a jittery sense of calm that’s easy to immerse yourself. The former feels like the structures around you slowly crumbling, and as you sense impending doom the song provides an otherworldly calm that washes over you and allows you to embrace the inevitable. The latter continues that uneasiness but closes ‘Eeeeeeee’ on a stellar, subdued note that’s like a cliffhanger to a story that’s intentionally left open.
The output from Short Span fits neatly into what you’d want from a new dub techno imprint: reverence for the genre yet a willingness to breathe new life into it and say something new. Unlike the hypnotic, quasi R&B psych-ambient leanings of other labels, Short Span tweaks our expectations with subtle, exploratory releases that are dubby and trippy while remaining engaging and not losing the thread.
Picture offers up a sonic distillation of our current times, where the paranoia and unease from each day’s news report leads to a numbness to the next set of atrocities. Letting ‘Eeeeeeee’ play front to back is giving in to and letting go of your anxieties. Zaks has crafted a deeply considered realm of sound, where the production flourishes shine when you crank up the volume and give ‘Eeeeeeee’ your full attention. His Short Span debut is a welcome addition to an excellent, continually fascinating label.
‘Eeeeeeee’ is out now via Short Span. Buy a vinyl copy from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. Waaaaaaaa
2. Tyyyyyyyyy
3. Heeeeeeee
4. Keeeeeee
5. Yeeeeeee
6. Qeeeeeeee