A large portion of the tracks on Terrence Dixon's From the Far Future Pt. 2 end exactly where they started. Many of them don't seem to do a ton in the middle either. Dixon just lays out what's going to happen and then very subtly tweaks it for about as long as he thinks it needs to be tweaked. The album's cover art couldn't be more fitting: An enormous sphere, precariously held up by a few stabilizing pieces of wood. Get the angle wrong, and it all falls down. Get the angle right, and it's a sight to behold.
More often than not on From the Far Future Pt. 2, Dixon gets it right. "The Auto Factory" is disorienting fast-paced techno, its main loop coloured every so often by what sounds like rising pink noise. "Tone" holds all of the melody underneath a heavy kick, Dixon inviting you inside his soundworld to find it. "Fountain of Life," meanwhile, puts the glittering synths proudly to the fore. If this weren't resolutely minimal, you'd expect Dixon to take it somewhere euphoric. But instead he just holds you there, daring you to look away.
One of the reasons that you don't is that Dixon seems to favour remarkably soft kick drums. It's easy to listen to him skipping across the surface of tracks like "Vision Blurry," "Navigate" and "Blinking & Flashing." That's not to say that he doesn't put the hammer down every so often. ("Horizon" bangs just fine.) But even when he does, the stuff swirling around it seems to indicate that he could never fully commit to dance floor functionality. "Lead by Example" starts out ready to do so, but the kick disappears in the second minute, swallowed up by a synth that echoes the main melody. It tries a few more times to come back, but Dixon pulls it in and out almost randomly.
As Peter Van Hoesen recently put it in an interview with RA, "[Terrence Dixon] is just totally his own man, isn't he? He doesn't take any of the usual formatting into account." Those two sentences pretty much nail what makes Dixon so interesting to those in the house and techno world. When you expect the tracks on From the Far Future Pt. 2 to zig, they zag. It's as though Dixon either hasn't seen a dance floor in a while or he's simply creating dance music without caring about what "works." Either way, it makes for a fascinating listen.
