Suara boss Coyu pushes himself further into the abyss in the third installment of the Mental Breakdown series, “Mental Breakdown Part 3.
Suara is ‘All about music and Cats’ and now a well-established label about mental health. The grooves in this release are certainly sick. If we’re looking at the progress of the Mental Breakdown series so far, this installment comes with a little more stripped-back and darker flavors, and with a little bit more room in the mix than its predecessors.
With the track “Preuba,” we have something similar to Jel Ford’s old sound of the Jericho imprint and other similar ideas from the likes of DJ Lucas “Turn it up” on Planet Rhythm in ’98. But the tribal toms are only a throwback and a foundation on which to test interesting synthesis ideas with tension and filtered atmospheres. As the track progresses, the concept of the hand drum foundation evolves to highlight these overlain elements (something that never really happened in the 90s).
What can be said about Coyu is that he really knows his techno from a historical perspective and is heavily invested in taking the whole of its history forward into the present day. One of these, if we are to assume anything, is possibly a vaguely reminiscent reference to The Reese Project’s “Station of the Groove” where the lead sample is “break it down, get you into the groove.” Like that song, the vocal snippet in “Intenta” is very heavily chopped and reworked. And similarly, it has a strong push-pull in that groove. But Coyu will obviously not stop there; he takes it to a very cerebral place with the dotted 16th note chops of the sample, creating a very trippy line that really tickles the brain.
Lastly is “Atrevete.” It has some earmarks of a Pascal FEOS sound, but this one’s more about Coyu’s sound design choices and creating this running and flowing stream of percussion and energy that doesn’t stop from beginning to end.
So what is it about the turn of the century techno that really has bent the ears of most producers these days? Well, for one, it’s mostly a coming of age, really. It takes quite a few years to become truly proficient at making techno tracks, a considerable amount more for mastery, and prior to that, most people have had a rock-solid DJ career for some years prior to that.
It’s the maturity of an influence, where the people who were making techno in the late 90s were bringing what they loved to the music in the 90s. Their influences were punk, dub, electro funk, house, EBM, new beat, industrial, and dark wave, etc., 10-20 years prior. And so to it goes, producers of the current market are bringing their turn of the century techno influences and elevating it to a place that’s familiar and pushing it to a new direction.
For the other reason, it is that late 90s techno is so iconic as to the definition of what techno is and has been, when it was the antithesis to other genres such as trance, house, progressive, and so forth. So for that reason, it set a real solid line as to what the tropes of the techno genre were, and it’s easy to follow that line to get a proper techno sound. But it’s one thing to create some throwbacks; it’s another to take those ideas and twist them at will towards something that hasn’t been heard before. Giving people a basis of familiarity that they love, and then taking them to a new place that the artist decides, and that’s always exciting to hear. This is a concept Coyu really knows like the back of his hand.
Overall, “Mental Breakdown Part 3” is a solid release for Coyu. This one definitely has a great spirit of play and adventure within, while showing he’s the master of his craft and can throw down bangers at will.
-Sean Ocean
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