A closing serving suggestion might be that Slow Beauty is best consumed less in full-on focused home listening mode than in expansive semi-distracted mix dosage.
Dub Techno. It never dies, but its still-smouldering embers keep being re-stoked into new dub-smoke and tech-flames. The vectors from Kingston to Detroit moved EU-wards—to Berlin, and Bristol, and now, more and more, it’s shifted further East-wards: to Vilnius (grad-u), St Petersburg (Gradient), Omsk (Unbalance), even… er…where? Dnipropetrovsk Oblast?! (Subforms)… um… Kazan? Да! That’s where you’ll find Martin Schulte -Marat Shibaev, to his folks – a name by now familiar to an ever-faithful band of Dub-tech-heads. Faux-Teutonic moniker connects him via Trans-Deutsche Express to a Köln-Frankfurt-Berlin narrative of electro-techno history, seeming to seek to sneak in some Elektronische Straße-cred. Something of a veteran for one so young, his Slow Beauty is already a fourth for Japan’s Lantern, following debut Depth of Soul, Treasure, and Odysseia.
Evidently a photography buff, Shibaev took all the photos for a work dedicated to all snappers worldwide, claiming each track to be ‘like a picture in a slide show that moves slowly from one to another.’ Somewhere between a Kompakt and a Basic Channel, odd off-road turns in rhythm and sound enliven an otherwise smooth and straight ride, a particulate roughage occasionally leavening a generally mellow mood from chord cloud watch and dreamy dub-wash. Shiny new software and production values may endow Slow Beauty with a more contemporary sheen, but its ID is classic D-T, steeped deep in its sub-genre tropes, albeit more harmonically and timbrally evolved than regulation issue. Like “Spring Aroma,” coming on like a Deepchord doppelgänger, a remake re-Modell with an extra chromosome, threaded through with ambient and field filigree. “Mutation” and “Supper” ramp up with sustenance in the form of loop-driven bubble and squeak, sneaking in more veiled gestures – nods to Fluxion and Yagya, on a rhythmical ride with a lyrical leaning. Four is ever-ready to land squarely on floor to get its kicks – the frame for the flesh and blood of its stabs and pads. “Floating” borrows its beat+bass from one of Maurizio’s M series (maybe “M-4”?) though Martin/Marat manages to make enough moves of his own with a shedload of shimmies, shakes, and echological quakes.
As with most drivers of one of EDM’s most popular vehicles, Martin Schulte isn’t about to re-invent its rotating base component. From detail emerges a touch of the devil, whether in the way he spreads effluvia from his field recording stash to make his garden grow, or the tweak of a beat’s treatment, a fold in its fleshing-out—a grain in a voice, a sliver in a strata, keeping things out of default deep-house doldrums. It serves to set Schulte/Shibaev apart from the he(a)rd mentality, though a closing serving suggestion might be that Slow Beauty is best consumed less in full-on focused home listening mode than in expansive semi-distracted mix dosage.
Slow Beauty is available on Lantern via Nature Bliss—physical or digital.
