- DC duo Benoit & Sergio do a stylistic U-turn on their first release for Spectral Sound, eschewing the breed of "romantic techno" that cast the spotlight on them when their debut What I've Lost appeared on Bruno Pronsato's thesongsays label last fall. There the two garnered acclaim for mixing warm, slippery tendrils of rhythm together with Sergio's lovelorn Paul-Simonisms into a kind of magic cocktail of emotive electronics.
A romping banger by comparison, "Midnight People" leaves bedroom contemplation in the dust, offering pumpin' beats with a darkly sexy sheen. Sergio's croon effectively reduced a layer of neatly-shaved samples and a near-chant of "she was alive!" The duo's inventive sense of production, reminiscent of Pronsato's own, especially the organic handclaps, thankfully doesn't suffer much at the expense of a big-room sound—there's a long and nimble three minutes of intricate sound-sliver build-up before the tune's heart really starts to pound, and enough dramatic twists and turns throughout to make ten minutes seem like two.
Parisian Charles Siegling, these days bearing the Technasia moniker all on his own, offers up two dub versions by way of remix support. They're both fairly busy affairs, heavy on the house and light on detail. Siegling's m.o. appears to have been to find ways of scaling down the expansive "Midnight" into more DJ-digestible chunks. The first version, a roided-up stomper, is arguably the more attractive of the two. Running in a lower gear, the second's more conventional drum palette isn't perhaps best matched by its comparatively restrained track flow.
Tracklist A1 Midnight People
B1 Midnight People (Techansia Dub 1)
B2 Midnight People (Techansia Dub 2)