This is what I've been pouring into my ear tubes recently.
PLASTIKMAN: EX (MUTE)
Slow-ass acid techno, performed live in New York, that's as sharp as a million pins piercing your brain. There's so much space in Pastikman's first album for a decade, a simple cymbal shudders plaster from the walls. The growling bassline of EXtrude will knock you off your feet. Every moment is played for a live experience, and although progress is, on the surface, glacial, the themes submerge and rise with a beautiful and hypnotic dynamism. And Richie Hawtin certainly offers us the best production I've heard in 2014. Run for the hills, Jon Hopkins!
PLAID: REACHY PRINTS (WARP)
IDM's most listenable, most melodic moment of the year, and certainly Plaid's "easiest" album. Nafovanny's moody loping is nothing less than a five minute pop song with a stadium-techno refrain, albeit with that ethereal chiming to make things sounds like a steel drum band on Venus. Like their older tracks Eyen and Get What You Gave, most of this feels simple and familiar. Throughout, there's Kraftwerkian melodies, home-listening melancholia and, on Matin Lunaire, a close approximation of Wonky-era Orbital. The most Plaidian Plaid to date.
PATTEN - ESTOILE NAIANT (WARP)
And here's an album I started listening to a lot then gave up on. patten's complex and messy electronica sounds like Boards of Canada with broken legs. It has all the sounds of classic IDM, but it seems somehow distracted and entirely of the head rather than the heart. There's so much bustling on Key Embedded, while their most intriguing moment Drift kills itself with its own percussion. Still, I love the abstraction and the Autechre bit of me has an utter tentpole at the sound of it all.
Further Fats: Bleep Years day two: Plaid's Get What You Gave (2012)
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