About

For a young talent like Munich producer Bryan Müller (aka Skee Mask), a challenge emerged: how to engage with the beloved, vast ’90s dance canon of hardcore music, Amen breaks, and ambient techno, without resorting to facile nostalgia. Müller has spent the past decade combining dance-music histories in all sorts of beguiling ways: dubbed-out hardgroove techno, fleet-footed drum ’n’ bass and bone-chilling ambience, psychedelic and minimalistic IDM. Resort, the electronic producer’s latest LP, may be his most potent distillation yet. Here, he makes his club-ready approach to historiography clear, crumpling up timelines and sketching out a universe.

Part of the thrill of Resort is in watching Müller stretch out a bit, exploring new territories by revisiting old traditions. In doing so, he offers up some of his warmest and most inviting music to date, giving his always-precise drum programming a sepia-tinged hue. In its best moments, the LP sounds beamed in from a slightly different universe, one in which Warp and Rephlex never left the mid-’90s and every sample arrived blanketed in a thin layer of dust. “BB Care,” thanks to its ramshackle drums, dreamy synth pads, and barely there vocal samples, feels like a forgotten bonus track from Music Has the Right to Children. “Hölzl Was a Dancer,” a house-music stomper with shuffle-and-skip drums and an acrobatic bassline, might have lit up dancefloors in 1992. The hazy synth workout “Hedwig Transformation Group” recalls GAS at his most blissed-out, while “Waldmeister” displays Müller’s ambient-techno chops, with sun-dappled synthesizers gleaming amid groaning bass. For all its retro-leaning references, Resort is hardly shackled to the past. It is a series of clever and subtle reimaginings, fusing new-school and genre-agnostic approaches to electronic music with vintage textures. Resort, with its blissed-out breakbeats, lucid-dream techno, and gauzy downtempo, is both a quiet flex and an ode to umpteen dance-music histories. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: Ilian Tape
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Released: 2024
Genre: Electronic
Style: Techno, Ambient, Breakbeat, Drum n Bass

File under: House / Electro / Techno
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