Its ten tracks are high in homogeneity, though the template may shift now and then from 4-to-the-floor toward something more broken beat or bass, there’s little deviation from its basic tonal vocabulary: throbbing pouches of bass pulses, saw-tooth synth drones and stabs, circuitry jerking with industrially-tooled thunks and FX-drenched bleepery.
[Listen | Purchase] In 2009-2010 a series of five nameless ink-stamped vinyl slabs appear under the cipher Traversable Wormhole. Fuelled by the fetishism of the 12″ series in minimal techno, it drew in renowned retailers and scenester DJ’s alike, each record ramping up the murmur and mystery. Then one day one man stood suddenly revealed as the unlikely object of manipulated desire: Adam X. Yes, that same Adam X who ran the cult NYC SonicGroove store and label way back when – trafficker in techno of an electronic-bodily kind. He’d arrived at a singular industrial-techno-EBM blend by ’90s-’00s turn, only for it to die a death with the fall of all things loud and banging to a bloodless coup of minimal (techno) and micro (house). But a decade on, with what goes around coming around, conditions were suddenly perfect in a field flattened by the rise of old-school hard techno conduits, club Berghain and Ostgut-Ton. Tuned in to Berghain frequencies, Mr X forged a number of sci-fi-noir but floor-friendly creations from under his Wormhole cloak to pre-empt any frightening of certain otherwise well-tempered horses (Adam X?! Nnnnaaaay!!!) .
Vol 01-05, then, is a mix formed of all the A’s and B’s of those five 12″s courtesy of CLR, whose boss Chris Liebing cemented the TW deal with Mr X in a Berghain-sealed summit. Its ten tracks are high in homogeneity, though the template may shift now and then from 4-to-the-floor toward something more broken beat or bass, there’s little deviation from its basic tonal vocabulary: throbbing pouches of bass pulses, saw-tooth synth drones and stabs, circuitry jerking with industrially-tooled thunks and FX-drenched bleepery. The likes of “Tachyon” and “Superluminal” flaunt their stick-figure sketch nature, blunt lines drawing vectors of techno, dubstep and electronica together with a stylized kind of art-brut brush: kickdrum piston-pump, hi-hat radiator-hiss, anvil-hammer sturm and panel-beater drang. There’s a fizzing electric charge to the buzzing synthetics of “Exiting the Milkway,” as if it were wrought from scrapyard machine parts reassembled and driven to the limits of function. “Transducer” is all things to all New Brutalist Techno men, a jumping and pumping bricolage of Marcels Dettmann and Fengler going head-to-head with Ancient Methods and Seldom Felt – an insistent thwack’n’jack that holds back from all-out attack to find room to move within its recursive groove-jacket. Otherwise it’s default-setting space-time-trajectory techno with a dark hi-tech sheen and a monochrome resolution, titles flaunting their future-basing remit: “Closed Timelike Curve,” “Relativistic Time Dilation,” zodiac mind-warps of sublimated screech, groan and grind, bass saturations and delay-drenched percussion nebulae.
Richie Hawtin did something similar 11 years ago with Plastikman’s Consumed, but it was rendered other – a vaporous form of techno-as-ambient in ghostly suspension. TW is, ironically, considering its origins more than a decade on, less advanced, without being ‘retro’ fit. It’s simply happy being clunky and clodhopping in its take on atmospheric techno transport, in the unmediated simplicity of its sci-fi signifiers, migraine metallics and dark ambient droneage, in the bluff pummeling of its black holes of bass, strident scree and industrial battery. Its pleasures may feel a little simple-minded, but, as with even the best of the techno DJ mixes, heads-down no-nonsense zoning-in is the key to getting kicks on a relentless route. TW may make easy gains from a main line into the Berghain vein, but is certainly no Berghain-again. It may lack the ice-kuhl bump-ride of Berlin boys Dettman and Klock, the sneaky moves of a Function, the imaginative tweakery of a Regis, or the sheer eerie wooze of a Milton Bradley, a fellow sci-fi traveller; but it’s an effectively functional techno mix distinguished by its hole-y way of worming – a knowing kind of Forbidden Planet play. Overall, its Cyclopean single-mindedness works well, making for a naturally dovetailing stylistically unified sound model that plays within a well-established lexis of occluded techno tropes. Heads should also be upped to a concurrent remix series with various TW tracks retooled by a long litany of tech-luminaries like Surgeon, Function, Marcel Dettmann, Peter Van Hoesen, Sleeparchive, James Ruskin, and Kevin Gorman.
Vol. 01-05 is out now on CLR. [Listen | Purchase]
