- Big-room techno, Leonce style.
- Coming to international prominence thanks to a string of world-class R&B edits and affiliations with influential crews like Night Slugs—and, more recently, opening for Beyoncé—Leonce has always sat in the middle of crossover dance music and underground club music, much like the scenes in the two cities where he cut his teeth, New Orleans and Atlanta. More than any of his other releases, System Of Objects zeroes in on an essentialist yet open-minded view of techno and house, stripped down to their fundamental parts. It's a sound that the Atlanta producer has gradually unveiled over releases like his 2019 Tripwires EP and emerges fully formed on System Of Objects. This is modular dance music in both senses of the word: generative synth wizardry means out-of-this-world textures over drum tracks made of interlocking building blocks. Leonce's layers of rhythm move at different speeds, giving the album a distinct, topsy-turvy feel, but things always lock back into place.
System Of Objects was inspired by everything that goes into a nightclub experience, everything from the fog machine to the sound system to the staff. The LP comes accompanied with artwork that looks like a post-apocalyptic Printworks or Berghain, and has a gargantuan sound to match. This is intricately detailed dance music made for huge rooms. There's a hint of Ibiza pots-and-pans percussion to "Amyl Nitrate," but it's welded to a rowdy, Baltimore club-influenced kick. Of course, there's still a Leonce touch: listen to the way the tuned percussion sings up and down scales, making the drums a melody in themselves.
Some of the best techno is made of sounds that don't really sound like anything: drums that hit like heavy metals that haven't been invented yet, synths that glitch like haywire machinery. There's plenty of that on the excellent "Kundle Dub," where lysergic chords land like viscous droplets in the empty spaces of the punchy, staccato drum pattern. "Closing In" is full of intricate, miniature metallic spasms, as if the heavy kicks were shaking the song's entire framework and letting spare parts go flying and rattle around. On each new cut, Leonce creates an inviting but antagonistic atmosphere. Check out the maniacal closing track, "Third Time's The Charm," whose triplet onslaught might feel funky if it didn't also feel like it was trying to kill you.
On the slicker side, there's "Not Here For It," whose kick drum and crazed vocal samples hit like a post-Night Slugs version of The Bucketheads' 1995 hit, "The Bomb!" It's a tornado of peak-time house energy held in check by lockstep kick drums and a decadent synth arpeggio, while little clips of rave stabs add the merest hint of chaos. "Tuff Talk" with its expertly-chopped vocal, brings to mind a maestro on the MPC, sits on a sharply swung rhythm that Mike Servito might rightly refer to as a "bitch slap."
What makes Leonce's style of techno different than most isn't just the perfect mixdowns or the larger-than-life percussion sounds, but the very essence of his music. It's the New York strut of "Not Here For It," the way the rhythms snap and crash like ballroom tracks, how Leonce lets the pretty sequencer leads on "Eurorack Tears" go absolutely feral. This is big-room techno made by someone who's been rocking dance floors of all sizes over the past few years, someone who came up on hip-hop and regional sounds like New Orlean bounce, and then went traveling all around the global dance music circuit. System Of Objects is what techno sounds like to Leonce: intricate, funky and out of this world, rooted in a refreshing and deceptive simplicity.
Tracklist01. Not Here For It
02. Amyl Nitrate
03. Kundle Dub
04. Tuff Talk
05. Eurorack Tears
06. Closing In
07. Third Time's The Charm