- After his contribution to Ilian Tape's Because We Do! compilation, Argentina's Andrés Zacco returns with his first full release for the label. Like many of his countrymen, Zacco's roots are in minimal, but in the past couple of years he's developed a real flair for deep, nuanced techno that combines Detroit-influenced chords with dusky, dubby shadings. "Icegrass" is the perfect example of his sense of balance. Filtered chords beat in a three-against-two pattern over a tough machine groove, with cool reverb and hissing white noise lending the requisite bunker techno (read: Berghain) feel; most producers would have quit here and called it a day. But out of the cracked pavement grows a green, slender shoot of a melody, a wisp of a thing, buried low in the mix and softened by portamento, that complicates the picture and undoes the colder/harder/darker clichés of techno in 2011.
"Impulsion" sounds like Robert Hood by way of Conforce, with a lithe, wriggly bass figure in constant motion beneath driven 808s and chords that flicker like the sunlight of a gusty spring day. Marginally tougher than "Icegrass," it's nonetheless a refreshing fusion of masculine and feminine elements—a graceful display of force, and vice versa.
TracklistA Impulsion
B Icegrass