- With his debut album, DNA, Markus Suckut seems determined to tick-off every techno cliché. Monochromatic artwork? Check. Bleak one-word track titles? Check. A credit for Berlin's Dubplates and Mastering? But of course.
At first listen, the music may seem equally formulaic. "Rigid" has the compressed funk of a Ben Klock set. "Places" hangs there, throbbing sadly, like one of the quiet moments on Shed's The Traveller. "Vibrant" is a rugged bustle of dulled kicks, random squelches and rasping hi-hats that Dettmann would put to explosive use. You might reasonably ask, is that it in terms of range? On an hour-long album?
But if you play it loud and listen closely, Suckut will reel you in. Why? Because he is in masterful control of his sparse, decaying material. "Vibrant" may be familiar, but it's also beautiful, as is the lo-fi opener, "Path." "Shatter," for its part, is an extraordinary example of how you can create mournful desperation with little more than a commanding kick, a groaning hook and an echoing knock.
Far more surprising is the playfulness of certain tracks. "Rigid"'s main motif is what sounds like someone plucking, in a sloppily funky way, at a bass guitar, atop almost gleeful digital whooping. There is a similar giddiness to the rhythmic layering of "Remains," whose stark sonar pulses and squeaking percussion turn cartwheels against one another.
True, none of this exactly hangs together in a way that screams "home listening." And you've got to be in the mood for it—that is, open to the inexplicable excitement of a simple clap coming in at the right (/wrong) moment. But as much as you may have seen and heard this all before, Suckut proves that there is still plenty of life left in hard techno.
Tracklist01. Path
02. Dissociation
03. Dust
04. Rigid
05. Shatter
06. Doomed
07. Stranger
08. Vibrant
09. Remains
10. Places
11. Mirage