Christian Kleine :: Touch & Fuse (A Strangely Isolated Place)

It’s IDM, from a certain point of view—instrumental electronica with a decidedly old school sentiment, whose tube crushed digital 80s synth melodies, analog warmth and early 90s Warp-esque skittery beats feel equally at home today as they did 30-40 years ago.

Instrumental electronica with a decidedly old school sentiment

This is one of those timeless albums, within a window. Touch & Fuse could have been made anywhere between 1986 to 2035. It’s difficult to tell. What’s sure is that Christian Kleine has been releasing tunes since at least 2001, and has been producing since at least 1997. That kind of background provides a reference range, but this record encapsulates something more hazily defined in time. It’s IDM, from a certain point of view—instrumental electronica with a decidedly old school sentiment, whose tube crushed digital 80s synth melodies, analog warmth and early 90s Warp-esque skittery beats feel equally at home today as they did 30-40 years ago. They probably will for a long time.

Touch & Fuse feels incredibly familiar, like a CD I would have picked up at the record store in the late 90s but somehow missed while scrubbing through stacks of electronic releases in Minneapolis as a college kid. Or maybe it reminds me of old drum loops I used to bang out on my battery-powered Boss DR-5 drum machine while working at the video rental store—or rather what I imagined that being, if I’d been any good at the time. To put it more bluntly, it’s just one of those albums I would have jammed constantly if only it had been made sooner. For all I know, it sounds like it was.

Christian’s work on this album is affirmingly warm and welcoming, charming and accessible but challenging and intriguing. The title track defines this feeling adeptly, disintegrating towards the end into a distorted tape wash that feels like something someone made in your neighborhood before the turn of the century. The track immediately after, “Velvet Impulse” marries shoegaze strings with head-nodding breakbeats and a surreal synth melodic structure, reminiscent of early Aphex Twin. Throughout it reminds me at times of the work of Brian Grainger, aka Milieu—honest yet intricate, warm but deep. Familiar and weird.

My favorite track is “Reverse Angle” with its rock steady beat and ambient bell tones mashed in with samples of apparent home video—harkens back to the extra material from Jega that I always wish he’d released but never did, or some weird artist on Boards of Canada’s Hexagon Sun label that never was. I wish I’d had this album in my collection a long time ago.

Touch & Fuse is available on A Strangely Isolated Place. [Bandcamp]