Mike Dehnert At Juno Download

Review: Mike Dehnert arrives on the Echochord Colour series in the midst of a purple patch, having sported various takes on the glowering techno world he occupies, as anyone who has checked recent drops on his own Fachwerk and Clone Basement will testify! The EP opens in fine style with the guttural vocal intonations of "RGS2" cascading in sync with the gloopy bass hits, dragging you down a k-hole of despair until the rasping hi-hat procession arrives and a sense of industrial chaos grows. Flipside, "Bar2" operates around minute rhythmic deviations from the thick set groove - just wait for the sprawling synth line to coax more metallic hi-hat brilliance into action. Fellow Fachwerker Roman Lindau remixes "RGS2" into a growling, scratchy, heads down techno bump.

Review: Mike Dehnert is a firm fixture amongst the tougher realms of Berlin techno, not least for his Fachwerk label. This time around, the menacing lunge of EP opener "Montage" plumps straight for the awesome industrial, melodically-bled kind of techno that rattles Berghain on a weekend. "Isolateur" sparks even more interest with its housey refrain pinned down by a steady set of notes that seem positively musical in comparison. "Picon" is a surprise of ambient techno, with not a whiff of mixability about it. It's a pleasant reminder that, when he feels like it, Dehnert is capable of trying something different. An excellent and well rounded EP.

Review: Berlin producer Mike Dehnert's second artist album in as many years will probably not win any awards for its imaginative title, but once the needle drops, there is no end of surprises. The most remarkable aspect of Fachwerk 25 is that it sounds unlike anything else he has released. This is especially surprising given that he had come close to perfecting the art of creating grungy, Chain Reaction-influenced techno, but it is crucial that he did so as his releases had started to sound samey. Indeed, the greatest strength of this long player is that it sounds like many things, but the one thing that it only occasionally sounds like is a Fachwerk record. There are austere but brief codas on "Intro" (another great name!) and "STH", while Dehnert proves himself to be an unlikely fan of Italo and minimal wave with the pulsing grooves and eerie synths of "Fraction" and "Modulat". He also gets on board the acid train on "Resize" and "Slim" but thankfully doesn't attempt to recreate jack tracks, instead favouring a dalliance through rough rhythms. Speaking of underground techno, he shows his appreciation for the noisy, distorted end of minimalism once practised so effortlessly by Landstrum and Vogel on the wonky rhythm and analogue yelps of "Grundform", rather than the spacious dub rhythms of Basic Channel. But while Fachwerk 25 celebrates electronic music's past, it also sees Dehnert escape from his own musical inhibitions, and as the evocative ambient textures of "Courant" demonstrate, it is at times a painfully beautiful parting of ways.

Review: Mike Dehnert and his Fachwerk and MD2 labels have been at the forefront of 90s-inspired techno for the past few years - but will his consistently high strike rate translate to a long player? Thankfully, Dehnert sticks to what he knows best, resisting the ill-advised urge to position himself as a versatile all-rounder. Apart from the brief, abstract "Intro", the dreamy ambience of "Kontextfrei" and the hissing static noise of "Outro", the album centres on the dancefloor, but manages to avoid repetition. And while the dubby bass, scuffled beats and clanging percussion of "Infix" is indicative of the Berlin producer's abeyance to the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction axis, Framework widens his scope; "Beatmatching" is an uplifting vocal-sample heavy groove and this new-found playfulness is also audible on the rave riff sampling "Teilfolge" and the purring bassline and synth melodies of "Quattro". Dehnert may be operating in a new format, but Framework proves that when it comes to techno functionalism, he is peerless.