Shaman’s Paths certainly invokes a more shadowy world, often imbued with a sense of vague disquiet at some ominous nameless presence—not so much a fear of a black planet as perhaps a touch of dark night of the soul a la Heart of Darkness mixed with primeval regression angst Lord of the Flies.
[Release page] Described as one of “the three lynchpins of contemporary Italian techno,” (the others being Donato Dozzy and Giorgio Gigli) in a recent profile, Dino Sabatini set the tone for Prologue with inaugural release, No More. Its brooding pulsations aligned perfectly with a then-emergent techno tendency tagged ‘headfuck’ by the techgnoscenti, making a strong mission statement for the now-leading edge Munich label. The Prologue creed has since been further promulgated—by kindred spirits like Cio D’Or, Mike Parker and Milton Bradley, as well as the man himself, later-comers, Cassegrain, Abdulla Rashim, and (no doubt soon-to-be fourth of those ‘lynchpins of contemporary Italian techno’) Claudio PRC. Be it solo or as part of Modern Heads, Sabatini’s is an equal parts cerebral-heady-visceral techno blend, each element of which is given full voice on debut full-length, Shaman’s Paths. Trailed as a journey reflecting his ‘personal interpretation of the sounds of Africa,’ it taps into the myth of the shaman, drawing on derivations of African rhythms and library sounds from around the globe.
Of course, the dark continent is hardly uncharted territory for the modern dance practitioner, its repertoire of rite and rhythm having been plundered phonically by successive generations. One reviewer has observed of Shaman’s Paths: “the descriptor ‘tribal’ has long been devoid of a spiritual dimension in the context of all art, but the experience is genuinely tribal in the full, spiritual sense. Sabatini is re-appropriating the term.” A little overstated, one feels, and not just for the sweeping nature of its claim regarding re-appropriation. Admittedly Sabatini doesn’t content himself with idly lobbing a few random bongo grabs and ululations over some fruity 4/4 loops, but the tribal is actually somewhat soft-pedalled—less World-y than otherworldly, more outer limits than deep forest, through which, clearly, for Dino a few puffs of ethno-blow and slaps of tribal boho don’t cut any shaman’s paths. It’s more about the tribe of the current programme and the space of his past being linked through the narrative of the mesmeric trip, not so much with a parade of samples, more with a careful harnessing of shifting syncopated drum patterns that build through intense rhythmic choreographies, adorned with trails and tendrils of exotic timbres, ‘hot’ neo-‘afro’ percussives offset with cooler vapours from Berlin. The sound is at once industrial and organic, arcane and contemporary, atavistic and futurist; kicks and clanks, wood and skin slaps are twinned and tweaked with granular clouds of cavernous resonance. Tracks may be of static-seeming mien but deep listening yields subtle microvariations, transfixing with a gradual accumulation of momentum via the insistent slow-burn beat-patterning. The journey in brief with video linkage: from the eerie openings of “Apparition” and the downbeat “Prophecy,” accruing force through the deliberate “Soul Capture” and the minimal chiming unquiet of “Ritual” on to the propulsive tension of “Vision Quest,” the lighter-stepping luminosity of “Trance State,” building via the pounding portent of “Totem” to climax in the orgiastic pummelling of “White Witch” and a journey’s-end comedown in the softer syncopations and synth sustains of the closing “Icaro.”
Overall, then, this is a more experimental set from Sabatini wherein his studio savvy is less harnessed to parading beat sequencing prowess, more driven to push the envelope of his sonorous craft. With this foray down paths less trodden, he also stretches Prologue’s boundaries while taking forward the headtrip narco-techno tradition whose formation he contributed substantially to. Comparisons to fellow lynchpin Dozzy’s project (with Neel), Voices From The Lake, seemingly the more liked of these two late-2012 Prologue full-lengths (cf. voted RA album of the year), are invidious; not so much because VFTL is ‘more diverse and intricate’), but because the two are quite differently purposed and configured in tenor—not quite as dichotomized as Dozzy’s light and breezy and downbeat to Dino’s dark and stifling and intense, but close. Shaman’s Paths certainly invokes a more shadowy world, often imbued with a sense of vague disquiet at some ominous nameless presence—not so much a fear of a black planet as perhaps a touch of dark night of the soul a la Heart of Darkness mixed with primeval regression angst Lord of the Flies.
Shaman’s Paths is available on Prologue. [Release page]
