(03.07.09) Peter M. Kersten launched the Dial label in 1999 with Carsten Jost, and over the last ten years these Kompakt-assisted Hamburg-ers have covered minimal tech-house bases with differently flavored toppings. Early full-lengths offered intriguing tones of post-Parrish duskiness (Kersten’s own Lawrence), sampladelic Detroit tech-noir (Carsten Jost), and chiming (shoe-)Gas emissions (Pantha du Prince). Now Kersten’s back as Sten with The Essence, a second full-length assembling three previous singles along with six new tracks into a set of minimal and deep house excursions. Sten started out as Kersten’s dedicated outlet for more motor-city than mope-city material than his Lawrence project, evincing a more clinical less emotive take on the tech-house blueprint. And, though the Lawrence-Sten boundaries do blur, it’s with Sten that Kersten’s stripped-down Detroit and Chicago appropriations betray the starkest submissions to formalist filters.
Opener “Daylight” is the keynote address, as looped ripples of blue-velvet synth colour a backdrop whose outlines are formed by the most sedated of stripped-down 4/4 minor (7th)-key grooves; smart snare paradiddles and marimba-esque stabs gently develop the dynamic as it unfolds, creating subtle shifts, and the faintest of analogue smoke trails wafts over a mellow motorik. “Unknown Faces” and “The Gate” are sparser more propulsive tracks, adding percussive detail to the bare rhythmic frame, slowly coming alive in the keyboard colourings department, but still a somewhat showroom dummy take on old Detroit’s pulse and atmo. The three singles register more strongly, though not necessarily positively in the case of “Take Me To The Fridge,” whose treated vocal, lamely reiterated, hitched to a clunky sub-acid workout and queasy dissonant keyboard glissandos, urges less toward finger click than remote ‘skip’. Better is the electro-inclined “Squares,” with its more bountiful bassline, sequence-driven hints and spacious pads hanging somewhere between shady (John) Carpenter theme and bleak Jeff Mills dream. And “Way To The Stars” closes the album on an up (relatively), a different drum threaded with Derrick May dissonances chimingly skipping a pas-de-deux with stepped handclaps over darkening Lawrentian clouds. Before this the title track’s ghostly Detroit homage laces spiraling Reichian loops through its functional gridlike grooves, letting in the faintest of incursions from those diminished-chord mood swing strings. And “City of Dust” smartly gives suspended keyboard stabs center-stage to create a shifting rhythmic axis that dispels doofism, leaving the frantic without showing the door to 4/4.
It must be said, though, that what the The Essence eponomously strives for can get over-distilled. The tersest most under-scored works of Kersten have a frigid feel, templates short on filler. Perhaps this is Sten’s intention – to play teasingly around minimal’s thin red line between Nothingness and Eternity. That’s his prerogative, but one person’s rapt is another’s catatonic. And the listener’s thoughts may well turn to previous more effusive Dial-ins; to Carsten Jost’s sorely underrated You Don’t Need a Weatherman…, Pantha du Prince’s Diamond Daze, or Efdemin’s s/t (review here) – albums departing from the same base skeleton, but fleshed out with substance(s) to lift them beyond bare bones and flat function. To borrow, and embroider around, the late-night urban drive metaphor such material elicits, a cruise through an ill-lit late-modernist new town can be dispiriting or compelling, but when struck by a sense that it’s all constructed from references to others, by an overwhelming anonymous air of nonplace no-center, it’s the former feeling that kicks in. Disappointing, then, but, that said, there’s enough lowlight drama along the way to make The Essence, if not essential, then certainly worth a visit.
The Essence is out now on Dial. [Purchase
