Emotionally fueled throwback techno the Belgian way, listening to Julian Muller & CAIVA “Without You” released on Live From Earth Klub takes you back thirty years to a less cynical time in music.
There is a wonderful tension in this “Without You” collaboration between the techno kicks Julian Muller flies at you like baseballs in a batting cage and the almost sensual breathiness of CAIVA’s vocals, like an Air album on speed.
Euphoric melodies with enough heft to take up all the airspace in a warehouse interact with cheerful arpeggiations of acid on the title track. “Without You” is undeniably catchy; a techno throwback endowed with a rare earwormy hook. The production is smooth as butter, with the enigmatic cool of early Belgian trance. Percussion shimmers with an icy sizzle overtop the breathy, dreaming vocals. There’s even a smooth selection of blistering liquid jungle which compliments CAIVA’s voice even better, like an unexpected dance remix of a dreamy pop ballad.
Overtop the music, one imagines a flashy montage of gorgeously lovelorn people forgetting it all in some sumptuous Parisian nightclub on the Seine. Muller’s roots as resident at Belgium’s legendary Fuse club introduce a wonderful old school trance sensibility, the shameless euphoria of late nights lost in transformative rhythms.
“When All The Lights Go On” is a perfectly nostalgic banger that would have been a radio smasher in the European nineties. The baseline blinks with stroboscopic energy under the cooling melancholic vocals. It’s a deeply uncynical and genuine mode of songwriting that eschews trendy brutality to capture those delightful serotonin (natural or otherwise) filled moments of club floor emotion, which is a lot more interesting and fun to listen to than the alternative. The closer is pure non gimmicky techno, a buoyant kick, her voice redeployed as a lethal understated rhythmic weapon.
-Winston Mann
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