- Soren Jahan's work as Rene Audiard takes a starkly different tack from the deep house he makes as one half of B-Tracks. A scan through tracklists of mixes he's given away over the past year or so provides a good perspective on the influences he's drawing from: they heavily feature stripped-back, dubby material from labels like Perlon, Force Tracks, Basic Channel and Maurizio. And last year's well-received Pechorin album meshed together ideas from minimal house and dub techno in a way that felt distinctly contemporary, managing to avoid the trap of re-treading well-worn old ground.
This follow-up 12-inch is the second release on Jahan's own Blank Slate label (following a very solid debut outing that gathered four unknown producers), and finds his balance shifting further towards straight-up minimal house. It's done with real flair: each of the two tracks here unravels over 12-plus minutes, but they remain fascinating throughout. Jahan is skilled at blending his sounds together in such a way that it's tough to pick any one element from the fray. The bulk of the melodic heft of "Cywilizacja Pt. 1" is contained within a breathy pipe melody, but it's always eroding away at the edges into greyscale synth drones and what sound like the strains of a sunken choir. "Stranger" is noisier and rather more sinister, its clatter of incidental sound prickling at the edges of perception and recalling the paranoia of Ricardo Villalobos' strangest work.
TracklistA Cywilizacja Pt. 1
B Stranger