teshno

ahead of him dropping his second full length, two, later this month, chris rau gets snapped up by no nonsense house label never learnt for its third ep. after stripped and functional efforts from nyra and october & borai, marbled world is a warmer and more human release as is often rau’s want. the title track features the german’s usual marriage of smooth and incidental melody with crisper, more cutting machine made noises. a sad mandolin drifts like smoke behind a busy bassline scale that rides up and down incessantly, hurrying the whole thing along despite the overriding and lingering melancholy in the air. it conjures a feeling of jazzy excitement before ‘loot’ bangs that bit harder. here, zip wire acid rips through blocky, wooden beats as a frazzled synth line gets string out over and over again, breaking to raw drum breakdown before kicking like a techno loving mule.

the flip, ‘new stuff’, despite its title, is classic smallville: cuddly and deep, coated in thick dust and imbued with a number of charming melodic streams and candlelit hooks, it also has some of the sexiest, driest, most crushed flat claps you could ever imagine. on remix duty, lerosa re-models the loveliness as something much more aggressive and serrated. a wiggling acid bassline roams free through perfunctory, broken sounding percussion and only the scantest trace of the original’s fairy-tale melody remains. it’s angry and arresting and offers a nice counterpoint to the heartfelt heat elsewhere.

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