Had this on heavy-rotation over the last week or so, and it’s still blowing my mind like the first time I listened to it. As if running Raster-Noton wasn’t keeping Frank Bretschneider busy enough (not to mention on our favourite list of people), but he’s gone and dropped some electronic wizardry in the form of the Super.Trigger full-length.
Each track could be a cut ‘n’ paste of suitable sketches from the last few years, and for the first time ever this is a massive upside of a release. Nine tracks in total, each joint manages to change direction without dropping tempo or vibe, often using the same kit as it’s core. A nifty feat given how the percussion is what drives the entire album.Falling in somewhere between early Robert Hood techno, the experimental nature of Tristan Perich and the self-limiting creative structuring of Lone – though a shade deeper in composition than all those combined – it’s headphone listening start to finish. Not heard much like it previously, and certainly nothing in the same vein that will appeal to such a diverse audience
There’s been rumblings of a 2xLP on the way, but for the time being it’s CD and download only. Well worth breaking the wax-only rule for. Brief snippet of the title track below, one of the more on-edge offerings, press release right down the bottom.
via Raster-Noton
SUPER.TRIGGER is an absolute trove of percussive tensions and frequency driven finesse and deals mainly with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm.
frank bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and its complexity, to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. there is a real sense of perpetual evolution and coiled tightness to the pulsating rhythmic programming, while the subtle sheets of noise that fill the void behind the beats compete against the rhythm and their own sonic purity for a higher state of energy — a constant flux of tension and release.
SUPER.TRIGGER comes again in bretschneider’s signature style of ultra-clean bleeps and bouncing machine beats with terseness and precision, and a preference for high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone.
the combination of programming, composition and construction is connected with his very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound: controlled and objective. the whole follows simple mechanical states — on/off, up/down, soft/hard, slow/fast, loud/quiet — and is characterized by the absence of any romanticism. still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the music to dance-floor functionality, instead bretschneider always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to generate a surplus of funk.
in all, SUPER.TRIGGER is bretschneider’s most straightforward, clear and compact work yet.