The striking thing about Archive 02 is how much it achieves with so few sounds. Both "Sangre Por Oro" and "From the Womb" are built on immense, visceral foundations and shadowy mantras, which saturate the brain as they go on. In the former, a weightless and heavily-filtered synth line darts across the track's swampy surface, undergoing a slow, circuitous progression. In the latter, the loop is much shorter, and sounds like a thousand monks chanting in gloomy unison. Developer doesn't do anything particularly clever with these structures, but coupled with his detailed percussion, they're utterly hypnotic.
"The Truth" is fairly similar, this time placing twisted electric piano stabs over the thumping beats. The only true deviation from the assault is "Horns from the West." It sounds like the type of thing Ricardo Villalobos might play or make: kind of world-music-sounding, extremely tracky and hypnotic. It's little more than four-and-a-half minutes of booming brass horns over kicks and hats, the lot begging to be looped and blended. Modularz' tagline is "Techno in its purest form," and really, with the contents of Archive 02 in mind, it's pretty hard to argue.
Tracklist: Developer - Archive 02
A1 Sangre Por Oro
A2 Horns From The West
B1 The Truth
B2 From The Womb
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