Ekman carves crystalline shards of machine music, cold hard melodies against a screen of astral stirrings.
For five years London’s Abstract Forms has been searching through the underworld of Electronic music. Through the web of circuitry and wiring, Deixis’s label has sought out a range of acts and released warm Techno, by names such of Arne Weinberg and Kirk Degiorgio, and clinical Electro from the likes of Morphology, The Exaltics and Marco Bernardi. For their latest the UK imprint delves into the metallic coldness of Ekman aka Roel Dijcks.
Dijcks made his vinyl debut on the Bunker Records formidable offshoot Panzerkreuz, an LP of piercing industrial Acid punctured with Victorian asylum horror. Tessellation Automata comes from a similarly dark place but from the realm of Electro. “Fieber” opens with terse sounds and isolated chords. That alienation continues into “Lucid” where barren bars and spartan space are beamed back from Ekman’s world. It is this constant distance that permeates the record, listener and producer separated by numbing bass and spectral synthlines. Samples drift and resurface across the record. Human murmurings return for the ultimate piece; the title track being the final transmission of abstract alloy formulae to remove the final traces organic matter from the equation.
Ekman carves crystalline shards of machine music, cold hard melodies against a screen of astral stirrings. The grit and pain of his Panzerkreuz are left behind for Tessellation Automata. Clean Electro lines are constructed with a futuristic hopefulness. But the dissociation is still present, the darkness is present and the Northern chill is amplified for a cut of pure Electro.
Tessellation Automata is available on Abstract Forms. [Listen]
