The ARTS man, Emmanuel, continues to keep a low profile while delivering some of the most consistent and deeply groovy Techno this year with “You Are In The Right Place” being no exception.
There’s not much going on in the social media sphere with Emmanuel. There’s no long-winded tirades about this or that, or doing selfies, or snapping pics of food he’s eaten. Just Techno. Solid and well-thought out Techno. And it seems like keeping a low profile is really where his heart lies. For instance, he’s not tried too hard to fight for SEO against the Mexican singer by the same name.
It’s like you have to want to find his Techno and seek it out. Once you’ve found it, you find a Techno artist who’s fully at home making music on his terms. Here on the “You Are In The Right Place” EP, we find Emmanuel taking on a purposely subdued stance in this release. Focusing on tight dynamics processing, pulling down a lot of the intensity of the EQ back, and resting comfortably at a good 132 BPM.
This is also expertly stated in the track “They Control Us.” The bassline has so much potential to go absolutely bonkers, but it’s a calculated decision to hold this track back with full control and restraint. It has the same intellectual interest as someone looking at a caged tiger or safely viewing passing sharks behind glass. It’s benign to be on one side of the divide and a completely different story once the divide is removed.
On “You Name It,” Emmanuel also experiments with this method using a slamming kick and chopped snare pattern. The groove is strong and heavy but still restrained in every sense of the word. The only deviances in the concept of the EP are in the tribal-styled pattern variants of the drums in “You Are In The Right Place” and in the immense intensity of “Turbodance,” where the caged beast is so close to breaking through its restraints.
Some people who hear this EP will not get into it, since it doesn’t have the hyped-up intensity that is intrinsic to Techno these days. But one could argue that having expert control and restraint is also an emphatically Techno-like statement. Where so many people go one way, it’s also a very Techno idea to just go the other. Though one could argue how you should use this in a DJ set.
Simply put, good music is about contrast. Where you have one thing, you should put it up against another. Loud, quiet, near, far, up, down, left, right, (B, A, and Start). If you’re in a DJ set, you have these intensely raging high hats, and you want to give the dancer a break before going back into it. This EP is a great selection for just that. Solid slamming work here by Emmanuel, as always.
-Sean Ocean
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