And though its sleek body and production skin sheen may come across a touch bloodless—erring at times toward over-design, at its best Incubation has about it a composed magisterial mien that calls forth the term Classical Techno.
Though Dave Sumner has been dealing in techno forms as Function since the mid-90s, his star has been especially ascendant more recently by dint of a stake in Techno Zeitgeist-defining cooperative, Sandwell District. The architecture and design of the now-defunct triumvirate’s Feed-Forward provides a platform from which his own first full-length foray, Incubation, departs on a clearly aligned trajectory. In retrospect SD was a construct of intelligent techno design as much Sumner’s as of more-feted accomplices Karl O’Connor (Regis) and Peter Sutton (Female)—a sound he feeds forward, so to self-reflexively speak, in elegant pummeling bleep-noir symphonies, suggestively skulking in the metaphysical shadows at the edges of a cerebral ‘floor.
Those SD-signature thematic leitmotifs endow it with a narrative cohesion, though you may wish to by-pass the somewhat passé soundtrack-to-an-imaginary-film conceit invoked (Ostgut blurb) and go straight to the aural pleasures contained. Opener “Voiceprint” throws the default melodrama switch, like a synth preset designed to Transmit Message, an exercise in Music for Film 101: Something Portentous This Way Comes, it says. Amateur semiotics aside, “Voiceprint” is the overarching theme, its solemn droning pads and delayed claps—much traveled Function tropes—serving to tick the tone-setting box. Then, “Against The Wall,” a gloom-laden HGV of acid-ic bleep symphonics, eventually revs up to fully Function-ing ride—reverbed 303-shots shoot, hi-hats phase and kicks pump, demanding movement with menaces. “Counterpoint” then raids the back catalog for a snatch of an SD classic, spinning it into an eponymous interlude before “Modifier” dives back down, clattering claps, reversed rimshots and tenebrous synthesis summoning to a Stygian Bacchanal. The noir-tech fug that has descended dissipates a little to the house gestures of “Incubation (Ritual)”—a minimal colour concession further lightened by a version of “Inter” (from final SD release); the simple Detroit-derived motif and soft low-end, like the threaded-through sotto voce French narration, evinces a heretofore obscured sensibility. It prepares the ground for “Voiceprint (Reprise),” newly kitted out and freshly kicking, to collude with “Psychic Warfare” to clinch a harder denouement deal with a strong suit of 606 tick-kick and Plastikman-ic acid squiggle. The CD bundles in “Gradient I” from the Gradient EP—all fine and dandy in itself, but striking like an incongruent add-on.
Incubation ultimately shows Function can sustain an album with the best of them (cf. Silent Servant’s Negative Fascination and O’Connor’s Regis (various), facing down Techno Album-deniers with a set of tracks of pulse and atmo that progressively coheringly feed forward and back. Mix-Meister himself, Sumner hands mastering duties to Tobias Freund (himself with a still-warm Ostgut LP) for his studio savvy to render it beyond ‘floor function to carpeted consumption. And though its sleek body and production skin sheen may come across a touch bloodless—erring at times toward over-design, at its best Incubation has about it a composed magisterial mien that calls forth the term Classical Techno.
Incubation is available on Ostgut Ton [Release page]
