- High-energy warehouse bombs.
- InDreams, the debut album from Minimal Violence, is a full-throttle ride. This is because Vancouver's Ashlee Luk and Lida P let the dance floor decide the material. To make InDreams, the duo wrote hardware jams for live sets, played them out on tour and watched the reaction. Thrashing or headbanging were indicators of success. (The artists come from Vancouver's punk scene and maintain a scrappy, DIY ethos.) The best segments were then refined and rerecorded in the studio. InDreams shows that this an effective method, resulting in Minimal Violence's hardest music yet.
Techno is becoming faster and more extreme. In productions and club sets, the more rave styles mashed together, the fresher it seems. Minimal Violence's music is no exception. Trance, breaks, acid, hard techno and minimal synth all play into InDreams' maximalist tracklist, which spans 120 to over 150 BPM. There are, for better or worse, no subtle moments. While this approach makes Minimal Violence's aesthetic piercingly clear, it can also get exhausting as an LP. The duo's music is high energy, but they fail to explore a satisfying range of sounds and emotions. However, this won't be much of an issue for DJs looking for warehouse slayers. On that front, InDreams has plenty to offer.
Each track features banging kicks, grainy atmospheres and frantic percussion, topped off by huge synths that could split the sky open. There are also trance-like melodies, which add a devotional kind of drama (and make InDreams sound particularly on-trend). "June Anthem," clocking in at 155 BPM, is a chaotic club weapon loaded with emotional triggers: garbled screams, defiant arps, ringing alarms. "Last One At The Rave" is similarly cutthroat, with a hair-raising opening that explodes around the two-minute mark. Both the title track and "Virus Prophecy" are straighter takes on fast techno, where trance and acid are mischievously mixed together.
InDreams is also characterized by its raw, sometimes unconventional construction. The music maintains the improvisational feel of a hardware jam, and the drum programming is mental, filled with outbursts of hi-hats, offbeat snares and the bloody throb of accelerated toms. "New Hard Catch" is a wave-inspired techno chugger, with an unexpected jungle bridge and dark, trance-like breakdown. "Untitled Dream Sequence" has no kick but plenty of goth intensity, built from layers of filtered arps and a distorted hoover-filled outro. On "L.A.P," ripping hoovers also dominate the first 32 bars, making for a malevolent statement on the dance floor. Throughout InDreams, this is what Minimal Violence does best: no holds-barred drama.
Tracklist01. Untitled Dream Sequence
02. L.A.P
03. June Anthem
04. New Hard Catch
05. Persuasive Behaviour
06. InDreams
07. Virus Prophecy
08. D.TRX
09. Last One at the Rave
10. InDreams (Cardopusher Remix) [Bonus]
11. InDreams x URO (MV Powermoves Megamix) [Bonus]