If a recent Twitter post is anything to go by, Paul Rose, AKA Scuba, is only too aware that the dubstep/techno honeymoon has (finally) run its course. Not that he seems to care: This is his most techno-minded 12-inch to date.
A-side "Klinik" is so thoroughly entrenched in both camps—and a good many others, in fact—that talk of genres seems spurious. This is simply club music, and good club music at that. Picking up where his largely overlooked (and wonderful) "Tense" left off, it maintains a throbbing rhythmic trajectory, but trades that track's rubbery synthetic unity for a more disparate approach to sonic assemblage. Comprised of bleary, organ-like synth pads, bubbly, sub-aquatic pops and crackles, and periodic, disembodied bursts of what sounds like Kevin Saunderson's "Good Life," it exists in a murky, strangely colourless historical interzone, neither reverent nor celebratory but rather frozen and neutral, as if locked in cryogenic stasis. Granted, it doesn't quite gel—something, somewhere, is missing—but as an exercise in sonic collage it's both audacious and compelling.
Meanwhile, B-side "Hundreds & Thousands" sees Rose enter unbridled 4/4 territory with a nigh on textbook instantiation of the Berghain/Ostgut "sheet metal" school of techno. What he takes from his dubstep background is a healthy sense of swing, inhering this in a tightly packed but largely uneventful seven-minute stomp, all icy blasts of noise and squelchy clods of bass. Up there with the sparest of Dettmanns or Klocks, it's a bloody-minded piece of dance floor minimalism that, mixed appropriately, will wreak havoc with early-morning clubbers' waning minds. And there's not much the detractors can say to that now, is there?
Buy Scuba - Klinik / Hundreds & Thousands at
Tracklist: Scuba - Klinik / Hundreds & Thousands
 A Klinik
B Hundreds & Thousands
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