- A year after he deleted his discography from the internet, the rising techno prodigy returns with infectious minimal techno and house.
- Sometime last year, Max Watts wiped his entire discography off Bandcamp. Before that, in the span of just three years, the Nashville-born, Detroit-based producer earned a reputation for shuffling peak-time tracks that harkened back to a golden age of minimal Midwestern techno. His DJing was similarly vintage, rooted in a rare form of techno turntablism. At any gig, he could be found juggling and scratching vinyl like an upstart Claude Young. In this short amount of time, he amassed a faithful US following, despite his negligible social media presence and low-key promotion style. In 2021, I watched in awe as practically every respected DJ in Brooklyn filed onto Nowadays' wooden dance floor for his New York debut. The lore was just beginning to spread about this elusive techno prodigy who only plays vinyl.
Watts works with a blank canvas on The Dusk. This EP does not feature the heavily physical retro techno or tribal records he released at a fast clip during the height of the pandemic. Across the four-track project, Watts tempers the energizing pulse of techno with the melodic warmth of house. While still distinctly Midwestern, the sounds are subtler. Like Detroit's most beloved minimal techno producers, Watts produces with great élan, making the most out of sparsity by infusing each element with heavy swing.
Robert Hood, one of the progenitors of minimal techno, will often wax poetic about the importance of the hi-hat—a crucial element on The Dusk that pushes these tracks forward. The most house-informed cut, "ShortLivedFeeling," idles for over two minutes, before a slow build-up of alternating snare and hi-hat patterns leads to a dewy coat of chords and a beguiling three-note melody that could cruise on for eternity. The title track upholds the melodic lightness and percussive bounce of house in its opening, where horns trudge across a sparse landscape of bongo-led percussion, ticking hi-hats and barely-there vocal flourishes, before nose-diving into straightforward techno with creeping pads that sound stripped from a film noir. On his remix of "Dusk," Alex Falk, another Tennessean techno producer, cuts the sweetness of the hand percussion, adds more slam to the kicks and transforms the lightly tooted horns into whacking synths.
"Realminimal" is where Watts leans deeper into his minimal techno influences. The track kicks off with a loopy melody that stutters on occasion, like a car radio losing signal inside a tunnel. On the record's most captivating stretch, hi-hats, cymbals and claps arrive from all angles and cut out as abruptly as they were introduced. It takes a special skill to riff on nostalgic sounds like these without resorting to pastiche, and Watts has enough of it to spur excited whisperings of a bright new generation of techno.
Tracklist01. Dusk
02. Shortlivedfeeling
03. Realminimal
04. Dusk (Alex Falk Remix)