Chlär returns to the Primal Instinct label with an LP full of dark and funk-driven cuts that tip their mood towards the current socio political upheaval in the world with “The Architects of the Shadows”.
Earlier this year, we saw Alarico team up with Chlär under the name Funk Assault with the release “Paces Of Places” on the Primal Instinct label, and people lost their collective shit—as if the whole of the techno world thought that techno with a swing pattern couldn’t exist, or that if you’re adding a few sprinkles of house concepts to bangin’ techno it should be considered an entirely new genre.
Well, in a way, it was kind of like a reverse Tech House, where instead of house heads straightening up their house records with techno concepts, “Paces Of Places” took the idea and reversed it to add a needed dose of funk and groove to proper techno. Meanwhile, a majority of Hard Techno, while wildly popular on TikTok, was largely suffering from rigor mortis.
So it’s natural to see here on “The Architects Of Shadows” that Chlär is also making a similar extension of those ideas, but stripped back and more focused on clean straight beats that accent on the headnote in a true funky fashion. Some finely chopped soul vocals or syllables are thrown in here and there, but by and large, the LP here is working with a lot of funky syncopation in a way that was always present in techno but had fallen by the wayside.
This is also the major statement in the release, and it is done alongside the political element mentioned in the release notes, which accounts for this emotional tension in the music. By putting a contrast between what is generally considered good times and future-forward optimism, as with much of funk music, Chlär offers to counter that with these dark and emotionally challenging concepts and feelings.
The whole release is superb, but the release could also easily be summarized in the track “Fortress of Illusion,” where there’s a good deal of groove in the low mid-bass, and on top of that, there are syncopated elements thrown in to push or pull the beat back. There’s not a lot of heavy dissonance or unnerving synths to create tension, save for one used very sparingly, more so the music conceptually rests nearly entirely upon the lateral movement within the rhythm, providing a lot of consonance but the groove is the most important idea. This is done with dark imagery and alludes to moving constantly forward at a fast pace as all these dark images and sounds pass.
What makes Chlär’s take on techno so important and unique on this “The Architect of Shadows” LP is that it presents a lot of the principles of banging techno and makes them clean and minimalistic, but also wraps it up in a very syncopated package, making his style a fresh voice in the world of techno.
Chlär proves again that necessity is the mother of invention. Where everyone is going one way, you can go off and do something in the opposite direction and take the music to unique places, which is the most techno thing a musician in the genre can do.
-Sean Ocean
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