ALWAYS EVERYTHING

SHED // THE TRAVELLER

Ostgut Ton

>Buy from Boomkat<

There’s not even a shred of bombast or lofty grandeur to René Pawlowitz’s quiet reinventions of techno; perhaps that’s what makes them so viscerally appealing. The genre has always restlessly pursued new horizons through experimentation and constant redesign, but it can still be nigh on impossible to recreate the purity of the dancefloor experience on record. Just listen to Marcel Dettmann’s recent Ostgut Ton debut for evidence – his music achieves perfection through monochrome functionality, submitting to the demands of the environment it is most suited to, but home or headphone listens strip it of the sheer intensity and momentum it would achieve at, say, 8am in a darkened warehouse. On the other hand, Pawlowitz’s recorded output under his raft of pseudonyms does not suffer for lack of particular context; even his most dancefloor-oriented moments are pieced together with a delicate sleight of hand that lends them a gravity extending far beyond immediate thrills. His material as STP in particular – ‘The Fall’, and a stargazing remix on the first Dub Shed Sessions 12” – seems to hang weightless in an imagined void, fluorescing elegantly somewhere between outer and inner space.

On his second album as >Shed< those tendencies have become even more pronounced. The Traveller is anything but a straightforward dance album – in fact, even its most propulsive moments possess a heady fragility slightly offset from the cavernous thud of many of Shed’s labelmates. What he shares with the rest of the Ostgut Ton roster though is a raw, nervy feel, and a sense of pushing relentlessly forward in search of new pastures. If Shedding The Past was Pawlowitz using the album form as palette cleanser, making a bold statement of shrugging off techno’s legacy up to that point and forging something new, then The Traveller is a further step in that newfound direction. It’s certainly not an immediate listen - there’s nothing on here that hits as hard and fast as ‘Another Wedged Chicken’ or ‘That Beats Everything’ – but it’s a deeply rewarding one. In interviews and his DJ sets he has always made his love for the UK’s bass lineage abundantly clear, and while on his earlier music this emerged as flirtations with dubstep’s spacious template, here its spirit permeates the music fully. ‘The Bot’ could almost sit comfortably on Hotflush alongside the likes of Scuba, were it not for its almost unbearably tense atmosphere and slo-mo crawl, and ‘Mayday’ toes a similar sub-heavy line, all awkward snare hits and punctuated bursts of chromatic synth.

But this is still defiantly Shed music, and retains a focus of mind that sets it characteristically apart from any of 2010’s prevailing trends. The slow drift of opener ‘STP 2’ – a characteristic nod to the futurism that’s deeply ingrained in his work – sets the tone for an album that demands careful and close attention, and The Traveller’s easy narrative flow ensures it opens up most when listened to as a single entity. And over several listens its frequent brilliance begins to stand out – the way ‘Keep Time’s syncopated beat rubs up against a slow mechanical grind in the background; the gorgeous spiraling psychedelia of ‘44A (Hard Wax Forever!)’ that recalls Eno and Selected Ambient Works-era Aphex Twin; how stunning closer ‘Leave Things’ bursts from the speakers at a pace that initially seems unsettling before suddenly exploding in a dizzying flurry of junglist breaks, tying Pawlowitz’s music into a lineage that stretches back to the ambient experiments of Source Direct and further still beyond.

The question at this point, I suppose, is whether much of his music could really be described as ‘techno’ any more, at least in the strictest sense; but then it might be more pertinent to ask whether it really matters. The Traveller is a deeply involving and totally immersive listen, and upholds Pawlowitz’s reputation for pushing the genre forward in exciting and innovative new directions. Which, surely, was always techno’s aim in the first place?

Rory