Compiling several years’ worth of material and spanning nearly two hours, the Munich producer’s first full-length since 2018 feels cohesive, virtuosic, and thrillingly physical. Skee Mask put out a pair of EPs that felt like dueling reactions to lockdown blues, then stretching into month five in much of Europe and North America. In the sudden and prolonged absence of nightlife, ISS05’s unruly club cuts seemed to kick against the strictures of enforced downtime. On ISS06, on the other hand, a succession of beatless ambient tracks succumbed to numbing torpor. While some frustrated DJs distracted themselves by baking bread, the Munich producer just kept cutting up breakbeats. Mere weeks after the release of those records, Skee Mask, aka Bryan Müller, tweeted that he had yet another album in the can. At long last, Pool, released without advance warning is the promised fruit of that harvest.

Particularly in the case of dance music, a style predicated upon sweaty bodies swapping aerosols in close quarters, it’s hard not to read any given new release as a response to the pandemic year. But despite the timing of its completion, Pool isn't a report on the doldrums of 2020. Its 18 tracks, totaling an hour and 45 minutes, are drawn from the past four or five years of his daily studio regimen. Combined with its surprise release on Bandcamp, the record’s length and semi-archival nature—some of these songs predate the release of 2018’s Compro—might suggest that Pool is a clearinghouse of orphaned tracks meant to bide time before the next proper album. But Müller calls it “a fully conceived project,” the intended successor to Compro. (For now, there are no plans to make the album available beyond Bandcamp: “I just don’t get positive energy from [streaming] companies, and I wanted to send a message to other artists that they didn’t have to put their music on these platforms,” Müller recently said in an interview with Pitchfork contributor Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor newsletter.)

Where Skee Mask’s last EPs split his output between rhythm and atmosphere, Pool brings those elements back together. Müller continues to work with the types of sounds that have animated his work from the beginning: scabrous breaks and clean-lined 808s, seismic subs and airy pads, smoldering overdrive and dub delay. In the past, Skee Mask’s genre experiments have sometimes felt like he was checking various styles off a list, but Pool shows his work becoming more holistic, moving toward a kind of ur-dance music—as though the disparate continents of drum’n’bass, footwork, techno, electro, and downbeat were all merging back together into a spongy musical Pangaea. Twisting acid sequences give otherwise gentle ambient tracks a steely edge; funk basslines wriggle worm-like through drum’n’bass grooves; rugged jungle breaks and ambient dub flicker like two sides of a lenticular image. — via Pitchfork


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Label: Ilian Tape
Format: 3 x Vinyl, 12", Album, 180 g
Released: 2021
Genre: Electronic
Style: Techno, Ambient, Breakbeat, Drum n Bass

File under: House / Electro / Techno
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