Berlin resident Regent, often featured as Planet Rhythm and Arts favorite, brings intense high energy beats, and makes another slammin’, highly danceable techno release on Planet Rhythm with the “Ivory Mask EP.”
If you’re a techno head you just live for this kind of music, everything in its place, tidy, fist pumping, grooving, and hard edged music to dance to that is guaranteed to put a wicked smile on your face. That sort of thing is bread and butter stock for both Planet Rhythm and Regent who have a close history of working together to bring stalwart and steady techno ready to bang it out. In this EP, it’s a continuation of ideas and it really doesn’t mess with established perfection.
First track “Ivory Mask” starts us out with tight, ‘verbed out kicks that evolve with longer shadows into a tweaked and filtered vocal loop. Eventually this makes way for subdued anthemic synths with tasteful distortion and reverb. Meanwhile, below, the baseline provides that big gliding anthemic progression to raise your heart rate and clench your fists, pounding them to the beat.
Second track, “Healer” provides a deep grooving kick and has a strong syncopated high hat and shaker interplay. What really sends this over the top is the snapping claps and the deep atmosphere, all of which are locked right within the groove. That is really the beauty in this track. Regent’s excellent sense of timing and swing. It’s ultimate satisfaction to listen to, especially when the deep and soulful bell like chords come to calm the mix against the rasping FM bleeps in contrast. For those who predicted that hard groove would be a main stay last year, this is something of a dark hybrid. Not relying an any sampled Ben Sims style ‘recycled loops’ but it is wholly original.
Third track “Eastbound” has a galloping kick as its foundation. A plotted, deep atmospheric sound bed burbles noisily in the background. The ring modded resonant synth provides rhythm to the track… in a brilliant move, Regent layers a more driven kick over the top for a solid bass groove in the next section after the first break. The atmosphere continues to progress wilder as does the resonant rhythm synth and the syncopated high hats bring the intensity. All elements just sit really nicely rhythmically and the tails of each instrument really speak to everything else in the mix. Nothing fights each other for attention. Just great.
“Aftermath” is the last track up here and the kicks are something reminiscent of early 00s techno, crunchy deep and hard. Simple and pulsing hats keep the pace. Regent again provides some minor anthemic material with the main synth here, as it is joined by that old school open ride and string carry. The modern elements in the track would be the space and timing of the elements and the squelchy burbling atmospheric synth providing a deep layer and polyrhythms. The track does remind you something close to what Kevin Saunderson would make for his older hard techno releases with the emphasis on grooving bass and the big downturned anthemic synth.
This EP is the kind of thing that makes you just want to head over to Regent’s studio and spend extra time going through all of his tracks together and asking him, “Oh! Can you play that one again?” All of it is fire, and on a big system it’ll be dynamite. With this music you can easily see yourself with your head in the speaker holding your beer bottle in your left hand, with your right arm over your best mate’s shoulder, dancing, just glad to be alive. This is that kind of techno.
-Sean Ocean
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