- Deep and magical techno from one of the most exciting producers out there.
- Lindsey Wang makes deep techno that sounds nothing like deep techno. Take the title track from Otro Mundo, her last release as Polygonia. She starts with looped snippets of her voice over wooden percussion and acoustic instruments but, somehow, the frenetic chaos of this fourth world soundscape crystallises into the sort of track Marco Shuttle would play. It's a perfect distillation of what makes Wang singular. Whether she's making loungey jazz with her group Lyder, headsy techno or loopy minimal, her work is both whimsical and precise, like an autonomous assembly line installed in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
Her newest release, Da Nao Tian Gong, continues this streak of infusing meditative techno with a touch of magic. Da Nao Tian Gong is the name of an animated adaptation of the 16th-century Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West. This is very on-brand: Wang borrows the narrative grandiosity of the novel, but adds the technicolour mischief of old Saturday morning cartoons. "Disha Shu" has a techno-friendly kick drum, but the synths sound like croaking frogs at sunrise alongside dancing xylophones and little bursts of 303. "Jin Dou Yon" is just as playful, with twinkling arpeggios that crash over rumbling subs and wooden drum fills.
Part of what makes these songs so fun is how they flit between the organic and the synthetic. Even the record's more conventional club tunes, "Ruyi Jingu Bang" and "Shen Wai Shenfa," are dotted with unidentifiable sounds. While it's something of a clubland cliché to add a bit of live instrumentation or a field recording to dance music, Wang takes a slightly different approach. In an interview with Truants, she described a recent encounter hearing a starling birdcall, calling it "the most digital sounding bird singing I have ever heard." The traffic doesn't just go one way—even nature produces its own robotic dance tunes. Da Nao Tian Gong captures that symbiosis, building a refracted world where the natural and the electronic mirror one another.
Tracklist01. Jin Dou Yun
02. Shen Wai Shenfa
03. Ruyi Jingu Bang
04. Disha Shu