- Molecular techno experiments.
- Last month, Guy Brewer tweeted, "Getting comfortable and repeating yourself will only keep you relevant for so long." He's been practicing what he preaches for a while now. 2019's The Light Touch was unusually "wide and warm," while 2020's Too Stupid To Be Anxious was brawny and imposing. Now Brewer's fifth album, Constant Blue Light, goes deeper into the gritty, molecular side of techno than he ever has before.
Brewer told RA that making the tracks was a healing experience that allowed him to step out of himself and confront the emotional toll of the pandemic. These are gloomy, industrial sounds with purging qualities that feel more surgical than meditative, as if building these fussy sound sculptures was a form of catharsis. The hissing textures on the opener, "Slowly Counting Backwards," call to mind a dentist's drill, and the effect is intense. Listen to Constant Blue Light at night and you may find yourself checking to make sure your doors and windows are all shut and locked.
Throughout the album, Brewer sumberges the listener in sullen atmospheres and sees how long he can keep them there. On "Clotting Time," all conventional ideas of musical structure are abandoned, a haunting electronic passage that leaves the air thick with anticipation and unease. "Metronome" has a similarly hypnotic aura. It ticks and buzzes into something that ends exactly how it began, but you're still left feeling moved by the whole process.
Brewer's productions are laser-focused here. This is almost more of a technical showcase than a musical one, and he works at a cellular level. Listen closely enough and you can almost hear blood rushing through its capillaries with each shudder of its strange, alien rhythm sections.
The cascading granular sounds on "Natural Elevation," on the other hand, feel like sand scattering across a metallic surface—until they disappear completely. Brewer uses sudden silences to pull the rug out from beneath you, leaving you wondering how he could string together entire tracks from what feel like such tiny details.
Though it doesn't fit the definition of "minimal" as we know it, Constant Blue Light is outstanding minimal techno. Unnatural, almost microscopic sounds are molded into mind-bending rhythms or abstract shapes, constantly mutating in a gradual but profound way. The eight-minute centrepiece "Soft Palate" features caustic synth lines that agitate against each other like the shrill chirp of a cricket rubbing its legs together. Eventually this swells into a screech that distracts you from how different the drum line has become, as percussion that sounds like snooker balls clacking comes and goes amidst all this overwhelming sound. It's more like the inner workings of some arcane mechanism than a club track, an experiment that commemorates a decade of increasingly intricate techno craftsmanship from the Shifted project.
Tracklist01. Slowly Counting Backwards
02. Natural Elevation
03. The Weight Of It
04. Soft Palate
05. Into Your Ocean
06. Several Instances
07. Clotting Time
08. Standing Water
09. Tradecraft
10. This I Know