- Stunningly intricate techno from a modular master.
- There's a lovely backstory to how Sibel Koçer, AKA JakoJako, started putting out records. After she moved to Berlin she worked as a night nurse and found herself with ample time to watch YouTube tutorials and read about the process of modular synthesis. One soldering kit later, she found herself working at Schneider Sladen, Berlin's preeminent synth store. There, she shared her SoundCloud with someone who was crashing on Sam Barker's couch. Next thing you know, Barker put out her debut EP, Aequilibration, on Leisure System.
It's not hard to see what attracted Barker to Koçer's music. Each track on Aequilibration is nimble and beautiful. Where the drums stomp on most techno records, hers pirouette under melodies that hang with the precarity of icicles during the first spring thaw. Since that debut, her star has risen. She's one of Berghain's newest residents and has collaborated with the likes of Rødhad and Mareena, all while putting out her own steady stream of modular musings. While Koçer's most recent records have tended towards the ambient, her latest EP, Verve, takes her head-in-the-clouds style and pulls it closer to Earth with the weight of club-ready techno.
Both "Impetus" and "Nexus" are capital-T techno, but with a vibrancy that should appeal to the living room hobbyist as much as the big room DJ. The delay on the kick drums and dramatic breakdown on "Impetus" are a nice touch, but the real wizardry lies in the latticework of chords that float across the track. "Nexus" is heavier, but Koçer lets the track breathe with a lead line that surfaces from the murk. The other two tracks are even lighter. The sleepy, pulsing "Opak" harkens back to her Leisure System debut while "Auris" is dub techno that shimmers with the warmth we heard on DeepChord's stellar 2022 album, complete with little fireflies of melody darting in and out of the corner of the stereo field.
Verve—and Koçer's music more generally—offers a refreshing antidote to the macho world of modular synthesizers. She steers clear of meme-ready navel-gazing by seeking out what she once described to an interviewer as "the most beautiful melodies my brain can imagine." And while I can't see inside Koçer's head, Verve must come pretty close to that Platonic ideal. These are four tracks of fragile techno written in the key of wonder.
Tracklist01. Impetus
02. Opak
03. Auris
04. Nexus