Clubland March

Maybe it's the recession, perhaps it's the planetary alignment or it could even be down to Kanye's fashion mantourage making everyone pick their game up a little but there seems to be a wealth of incredible releases out there at the moment.

Mark Broom has been a constant figure on the techno scene since the mid nineties and unlike some of his peers has seemed to be able to adapt and push his sound with the times. He's pushing a particularly prolific level of output at the moment with no fewer than six releases to his name this year already.

One of his most recent, Deal Or No Deal is a four track EP of serious weight that features two tracks of clubby dub techno and a further two on the dark brooding house tip, though equally measured with a good dose of the bottom end frequencies. The title track sounds not unlike one of Broom's earlier Pure Plastic releases, such is the raw simplicity of the sounds used. Runners also pushes some nostalgia buttons, but sounds more like the earlier productions of New Yorker Steve Stoll's dubbier work. Both the VIP remix of This Town and Look And Stare round off the EP with two brilliant slices of slow-mo dub house, somewhere between the icy depths of Claro Intelecto and the housier stylings of Theo Parrish.

Out of The Netherlands and on the Frantic Flowers imprint is two hot sides from Dutch dub techno geezers Literon and Ovatow. Calling the release Permutations and taking one side of the record each, Literon cranks the kick drums up to stun and leaves the dust on the needle as he fills up the platter with swirling keys and heavily delayed chords. Ovatow's Permutation Two is a right proper dub techno affair with the bass sounds generally louder than the kicks, a plethora of zaps and distorted clicks filling up space and dreamy, swirling textures.

Stewart Walker's Stundenzimmer is a sweetly melodic affair, the title track itself using pitched up toms, chimes and lilting melodies to convey a spring like feel. L.A. River is outwardly a slightly darker affair, though underneath the paranoid sounding sliding synths there are miniature melodies at work while Seamless is much more pensive track, its pointed synths and yearning pads sounding like a soundtrack for a landing on Mars.

Tolga Fidan and Anthony Collins piece together some hot, tribal, digital house this month with the release of Violence/La Cadence on Vakant. Fidan's inimitable percussive style gets a good airing with the pair giving the two tracks a Latin feel to them, working the drums for a good four minutes on Violence before adding a tinkling piano (sounds a bit lame but that couldn't be further from the truth). Cadence acts as the dub mix of Violente, extending the drum break even longer, dirtying them up a bit and shortening the already minimal bass sounds.

The top of my list this month though is without a doubt the Martyn album Great Lengths. Dutchman Martijn Deykers who has been releasing drum and bass for some time now made the switch over to dubstep a couple of years ago, but with his productions increasingly blurring the lines between the genre and many others it's one he's not comfortable using when talking about his music. Great Lengths is for fans of Ramadanman, Peverelist, Pangaea and 2562 and is an album that immediately grabs you and doesn't let go. With relatively few albums released in this particularly niche corner of the dubstep/techno crossover there isn't too much else out there to stack it up against, but I would say it flows as effortlessly at Headhunter's Nomad and there will need to be something pretty special to come along and knock this off my best album of 2009 pedestal where it is loftily perched.

Mark Broom – Deal Or No Deal – Old school head messes in the dubby elements of techno.

****

Stewart Walker – Stundenzimmer – Beautiful melodic moments amidst some darker techno tones.

***

Martyn – Great Lengths – Breathtaking debut album from the man who refuses to be classified.

*****

Silverbeat's Top 5

Martyn – Great Lengths

Minilogue – Animals Remixes

Korablove – Green Gull

Lawrence – Hamtramck

2 Working Donkeys – Healed

Classic Listening

Slint - Spiderland