- From disco to dub, Luke Slater still makes dance music like no one else—this time with a live drum kit.
- Luke Slater has released over 20 LPs across an ever-evolving cast of aliases. These have included some of the best long players in techno history—from 1999's Wireless to his colossal interpretations of Berlin techno on The Messenger (the best of his records as Planetary Assault System). Then there are his excellent IDM-ish musings as the The 7th Plain and the cult favorite, Fluids Amniotic under the short-lived Magenistic moniker. Long story short, he's no stranger to the pesky techno album format. Still, though, Saturn to Home feels like something special in his catalogue. Typically, L.B. Dub Corp has been Slater's outlet for house music, but calling this record house would be like calling Andrew Weatherall a house DJ. Instead, what we get is a wonderfully weird exploration of everything from Italo disco to dub to Chicago house to sci-fi jazz. It's like getting lost in some sweaty basement where the rules of time and space (and genre) cease to exist.
Slater puts aside his arsenal of 808s and 909s and dusts off his own sticks to play live drums across Saturn To Home, which adds a distinct sense of swing and funk. His unpredictable snares and hi-hats land somewhere between bruk and old-school minimal on "Krank." He goes full Art Blakey with album closer "Cloak and Dagger," six minutes of improvised-sounding drums accented with melodic leads that are actually just swirls of feedback and bass pulses. For a producer whose music has always been precise, the human touch breaks up the quantized grid. You can still mix in and out of these tracks, but there's imperfections and jumps—a smiling ghost hiding in the machine.
Then there's the vocals. Slater has worked with vocalists in the past. 2002's Alright On Top was a memorable mainstream play with plenty of singers, but to be totally honest, the less we say about that one, the better. Saturn To Home pulls it off much more smoothly. Slater lays down spoken word prophecies over brushed snares and organ melodies that sound like an in-house organ band covering Bicep (in a good way). He taps Robert Owens for a Chicago tribute on "You Got Me," layering the legendary vocalist's vocals into a complex tapestry on top of a jacking proto-house rhythm. On "Golden Star," made with Alexandra Grübler—the mastermind between the weirdo synthpop of Baal & Mortimer—the two come up with a track somewhere between the Cocteau Twins and Massive Attack.
We haven't even touched on the sci-fi jazz of the Kittin-featuring title track, the heart-swelling dub techno of "No Trouble in Paradise" with Paul St. Hilaire or the pitch-perfect disco house of "Your Love." Saturn to Home is filled to the brim with ideas and collaborators, but it also underlines Slater's quiet brilliance. For his RA Podcast back in 2013, Slater explained that he wants to ensure that his music doesn't have any of "the easy plastic" gimmicks that he finds in so much club music. Here, he takes a real risk, darting across dance music history like a madman with a drum kit, but it's hard to find fault in any of it. Slater may be part of the old guard, but this record proves that the old guard can still operate at the vanguard.
Tracklist01. Saturn to Home feat. Kittin
02. You Got Me feat. Robert Owens
03. Your Love
04. Golden Star feat. Baal & Mortimer
05. Only The Good Times
06. Krank
07. No Trouble In Paradise feat. Paul St. Hilaire
08. Cloak and Dagger