Brisbane’s Metapattern and Melbourne’s Neo team up for some abstract, intelligent modern techno and a muted tonal color palette with their release “9925M” on the Hayes imprint.
It was just about a year ago when we covered Metapattern for his release on Truncate. Since then, he’s been featured on MORD with his “Silicone Age” release and has also just come out with a new book for ADSR, titled “The Secrets of Techno Production” for an authoritative guide on the lesser known ideas behind techno music production.
Now he teams up with Neo for a release that sheds light on Neo’s skills and which fully complements Metapattern’s own talents. “9925M” presents a low-key and calmly restrained look at techno.
The main idea in this release is most definitely taking big powerful ideas and making them stoic and lighter-hued rather than the aggressively themed tonal colors in other artists’ works in the techno sphere at present. They are also, in some ways, considering a more textural approach with saturation and filtering on this release. They are essentially taking heavy abrasive characteristics of other more distorted techno and making them with a softer and lighter feel, similar to touching suede or warm clay, rather than other ideas that present techno as cold and angular like polished stainless steel.
The entire release is warm and comforting, but it’s also somewhat abstract in its ideas. You can take Neo’s “Erradicate” as an example of this. There is a strong and well-controlled precision in the beats, with abrupt call-and-response patterns that seem to be samples of much longer improvisations distilled into sample hits or recorded midi chops, giving the track layers of ideas. These abrupt ideas are tempered by a strong, linear, kick bass hat skeletal pattern, where everything hangs and the aforementioned smoothing of the entire mix is done777 by filtering and saturation.
Similarly, we have Metapattern’s “Martians Among Us,” which also takes a similar approach, reeling in big, heavy ideas into calm and intelligently controlled techno. A lot of the big synth hits could go a lot further over the top into business techno territory, yet they are pulled down and filtered way before they reach that point.
The entire mix is blanketed by this subliminal, low-end, droning bass riff and the top-end texture is subtly always there and modulating as a contrast to it. Which again, gives the track this suede-like quality to it. Additionally, there are a lot of little ideas tucked away in the mix that you have to keep your ears out for but that are added as a kind of tonal wash in the delay and reverbs as their tails are filtered and pitch modulated. It’s the kind of thing that sounds great at high volume, but also can be left to be discovered on your own with some nice headphones.
Mind you, these are merely two examples of the release having these kinds of characteristics and showcases their approach painted into an EP under this concept. They all bolster the main muted theme of abstract techno concepts across the release, save for Neo’s somewhat 60s Sci-Fi adventure-themed “Deleterater” with its grooving rhythm-guitar styled synth plucks. This stands on its own since it brings to mind a sort of technicolor/Panavision aesthetic that matches the overall saturation and dulled tonal colors with the release.
You always have to hand it to the Hayes Collective and their releases, because they always represent techno that makes you think of other places and things within the music. Presenting Neo and Metapattern’s work reinforces that idea, since their music is definitely not about flash, rather this music is something you tend to sit with or visit with a loving ear over time.
-Sean Ocean
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