With a title “Outatim” and a blurb that references being inspired by film music, there are no prizes for guessing that there’s a “Back To The Future” reference in the first single from French artist Zer. But it’s not any of the themes, riffs or spoken word samples- it’s the sound of the converted electrified Delorean engine, used very sparingly as a wash and riser sound, with the faintest hint of the flux capacitor controller beeps in there.

Everything else about the track is fairly purist techno. The original opens with rich thumping kicks and immediate synth rumbles, a Tiesto-favoured technique from the 00’s, and the whole track remains fairly Tiesto-ish, with a fairly populist synth melody over a relentlessly hammering yet positive groove.

The AeFe remix falls in similar territory, again with thick kicks, but with a somewhat more rubbery synthbass that adds just the tiniest fraction of funk into proceedings. Personally I would’ve rather had the surprisingly catchy new bass pushed forward and the kicks pushed back, but that’s just me. The slightly grooved hi-hat patterns, kick and arpeggios all patch together into something that sounds very old school Hardfloor-ish, again pushing this release “out of time”- back to the 90’s.

If you’re expecting to be rocking the dancefloor with a techno cover of a Huey Lewis & The News track, think again!

The second album from Shanghai-based “Blood” is rather quirky- a set of ten succinct and surprisingly bright-sounding electronica instrumentals, packed with slightly off-centre rhythms, simple melodic loops formed from sometimes marginally silly synth sounds, and plenty of pure-sounding, speaker-wobbling sub-bass.

Like its accompanying artwork, it is both dark and strange, but it is a little stranger than it is dark. It’s generally all very tempered, and the measured pace of tracks like “Untouched Places” help emphasise the drama, for example when the aggressive distortion kicks in in the title track, or the more overt thumping techno of slightly Underworld-ish “Murderous Means”. As such it’s a solid fit for the Infinite Machine label, which has a very strong track record in this field.

There’ve been footwork-ish releases not too dissimilar to this where I’ve suggested that they sound like an incomplete grime album, with a big space in the middle where a rap, other vocal or lead instrument could go. There’s very little of that space here, in a good way. Tracks like “Night Wisps” fill it quite gently, with careful use of textured synth washes and plenty of atmospherics, while “Buona Fortuna” fills it very differently, with barking chanting sounds. It’s got plenty of international flavour, with Eastern influences poking through in the melody and percussion in tracks like “Potcheen”, but in a thoroughly modern way.

There is a case for saying this release lacks the USP to push it to the top of anyone’s 2021 lists. However it’s a release that charts its own course, taking some fairly familiar fundamentals but blending them together in a way that feels like it is bulging with ideas, and it’s well worth a listen.

My past and very positive experience of Celer music is with works that could be described as long-form- long ambient albums which draw you in for a good, indulgent hour. So this EP is something of a surprise- an 18-minute EP comprising six tracks initially described as ‘songs’. Would this represent a massive change in direction? Is Celer about to rock out?

For better or worse, the answer is no. From opening track “Great Circles” on it’s clear that these will still be gentle ambient manoeuvres, full of soft hums and calm washes, but always managing to avoid being cheesy. Celer’s music has been perfect for lockdown since before lockdowns were a thing.

“The Absence Of Atmosphere” accurately describes its own sci-fi, deep space tone, also adopted in the alien “Geodesy”, while pieces like “Two Months are Past, and More” and “After Departures”, while very similar in construction, feel a little more introspective and thoughtful.

Think of this like an artist’s small sketchbook, or a sampler, and enjoy a little snippet of the fairly straightforward but beautiful pleasures that Celer’s longer works offer you in more abundance.

“Vues spectrales” gathers together three of Denis Smalley’s multichannel works from between 2001 and 2011, converted to stereo. (It also bolts on one older work “Vortex” from 1982, more about which later on.)
Each of the formerly-multichannel works is a roughly 15-minute, ambience-driven, atmospheric construction that are dominated by great swathes of space and patience. “Spectral Lands” is, as the title suggests, something of a landscape portrait, with moderately natural-sounding rustlings akin to bird noises and wind through trees, but with more alien and ambiguous sonics grafted in to increase the complexity.
“Ringing Down The Sun”, by way of contrast, feels somewhat more alien. Low metallic rumbles open, hollow bottle-like distant melodies follow but at such a low level that you suspect you might be imagining them. There’s a tale being told here- not with excessive drama, but with a few more percussive and unexpected twists- and it’s gently sci-fi, but with a dose of introspective sorrow.
“Resounding” opens with a bell, then silence, before adopting a variety of other quite church-like tones of hammering and reverberation for something which manages to remain ambient and sparse yet have a dose of theatricality about it as well.
The older work “Vortex” is markedly different. While there are still periods of breathing space, it’s much busier and at times more chaotic, with a decidedly Radiophonic Workshop feel at times, very much reminiscent of the Doctor Who soundtrack work from around or just before 1982 when it was created. It’s curious, but without offering up a strong reason for it having been dug up, or attached to a series of more measured and more recent works with which it arguably doesn’t belong.
As usual, Empreintes Digitales has unearthed some intriguing pieces from the archive, and while there’s no revelations or masterworks in here, it’s certainly a collection of interesting textures.

Good progressive house is sometimes like a smooth road- when the quality is good, the journey is so smooth that you don’t even think about it. And that’s the approach taken on the “Collage” EP, a collection of three original tracks and two remixes, all of them steady seven-minute-ish instrumental progressive tracks full of the usual ingredients- steady soft kicks, even softer single-note synthbass, gentle melody loops, slow risers and so on. It’s a familiar set-up, but in this genre that’s not a bad thing.

“The Blacksmith” uses a spoken single-word sample in lieu of a cymbal sound to good success. The title track “Collage” has just a hint more purposefulness to it, and ominousness in the bass, but is still ultimately rather sweet. The track already has such a classic Bedrock feel to it that it seems something of a no-brainer to draft in the legendary Nick Muir for a remix of it, but it’s the Nick Muir mix that deviates from the tone the most, which isn’t saying much, thanks to rockier drums, a more driving, almost Moroder-ish synth line and a remarkably glam, almost over-the-top breakdown.

The unique detail in the fairly bubbly “Tahiche” is a slight off-step in the kick drum on the last bar of each phrase, which may sound tiny but in an EP defined by straight 4-4, it could qualify as the EP’s only surprise element. The Morttagua remix dwells more on the string pads and feels a little more cinematic.

The promo blurb for this release suggests that this is a genre mash-up mixing techno, trance, and deep house, and that’s not untrue, but it does it by sitting cross-legged and steady right in the middle of them, rather than crashing any of their more disparate sounds together. But if rock bands are allowed to stick to the boring guitars, bass and drums formula for so long, why shouldn’t progressive house get the same liberty? If high quality releases like this keep coming, then there’s absolutely no reason why not.