(June 2009) You can add the name Martin Schulte to a huge and ever-growing pulsating band of ambient-dub-techno exponents – one that may or may not rule from the centre of the Ultraworld, but certainly has acquired new powers. The embers of this smouldering sub-genre have been rekindled by new dub-smoke and tech-flames breaking out from Berlin (Quantec, Shoreless) to Bristol (Tectonic), Manchester (Modern Love) to Montreal (Atheus), London (Various) to uh… Kazan. Yup, that’s Russia, for the geographically challenged, and that where Martin Schulte comes in: “The tracks represent my soul and is like a sound gallery of paintings.” So says our Martin – known to passport controllers and his Mum as Marat Shibaev, evidently an earnest young man with a desire to get some Deep Inner out of his system and into ours.
As for the mantle of dub-techno torch-bearers, the likes of Rod Modell and Steve Hitchell (as DeepChord/Echospace/Intrusion et al.) had never really gone away, their efforts surely providing much of the fuel to this born again genre. Depth of Soul quickly establishes a recognisably Modell-ed dub-techno template with prickles of ambient detail, touches from the environmental and natural rubbed over to grain the beats. The set takes a while to gather pace but starts to draw the listener in around mid-way. Here “Forest” spools out a particularly successful blend of straightahead and reflective, a dead ringer for the UK’s Modern Love label, hitching the depth of Pendle Coven to the soul of Claro Intelecto. Then “Mutation” and “Supper” ramp things up, serving out sustenance in the form of loop-driven bubble and squeak, sneaking in some more veiled gestures – to Basic Channel (cf. Fluxion) and Force Inc (cf. Yagya).
But Schulte isn’t about to bother the envelop with too much pushing, despite the evident relish with which he releases textural infusions from his hard disk store of field recordings to muss up his otherwise straight-up dub-techery. Early on his scapes seem over-ready to land rather too obviously, seeking the safety of 4-on-the-floor dynamic solutions, and the heartbeat kick from which the blood of chord stabs and pads can get their pump action. There’s more latitude later on, when “Solar Eclipse” hits with grit, bristles with gristle, and marches to a different drum; applying the kind of textural experiment applied elsewhere to his topping to the beat base, Schulte gets a reverb-drenched and distantly emplaced snare-rimshot to recur reverberatively to create a weirdly configured beat centre through a beauteous blur.
So, ultimately, success; when his set’s doofist beat spine flexes, and is fleshed with a floating cast – a slurry and slick of granular textures and fluid strata. And, in the end, the set’s weakness – a certain invariance and uniformity – is revealed as strength. After all, a certain song-same-iness is homogeneity by another name, and this is presumably the ambit of the project’s narrowly conceived ambitions. For Depth of Soul feels like an album that wants to be experienced less in track-by-track taste mode, and more by the cumulative effect of the DJ-mix dynamic.
Depth Of Soul is out now on Lantern. [Purchase
