- The No Comment imprint has played host to a string of releases from its founder, Dutch producer Albert van Abbe, since its inception last year. The label is van Abbe's primary musical outlet, and the tightness of its focus is testament to his tunnel-vision approach to techno. (Most releases feature two originals and one remix as standard, and tracks tend to be titled with lengthy serial codes, as if culled from a production line.) Still, surface homogeneity conceals rich internal difference. The series charts van Abbe's roving ear, taking in tightly constrained warehouse aggression (0001), dubbier transmissions (0004), steely astral soundscapes (0003) and clipped minimalism (0005) across its five releases—not to mention an array of remixes from heavyweights including Heinrich Mueller and Conforce.
Within these stylistic confines, No Comment_0006 is more or less business as usual. "NCS_5600200512 [V2]" is a chugging, nocturnal affair, monolithic in its repetition save for the muted drones that hover just on the edge of perception. On the flip, fellow autonomous upstart Abdulla Rashim reworks the same track in typically abyssal fashion, all icy, rustling hi-hats and aquatic delays, just a glimmer of light peeking through in the closing minute.
The EP is rounded off by "P4S_88880003," which sees a return to the beatless, synth-based compositions that featured early in the series, but with a newfound volatility: where past efforts placed mournful, greyscale tones in a sparsely populated landscape, this one shrieks and groans as if aping the death throes of some alien creature. Nothing exactly groundbreaking here, but you get the sense that van Abbe is not concerned with pushing boundaries so much as collapsing the interstices between the various poles of his sound.
Tracklist A1 NCS_5600200512 (V2)
B1 NCS_5600200512 (Abdulla Rashim Remodel)
B2 P4S_88880003