German techo producer Housemeister’s second album of 2020 alone (bored in lockdown much?) is a fairly short mini-album of upbeat progressive house with a generally positive vibe befitting of the “Endless Summer” (sorry, “3ndl3ss Svmmer”) title, and easing off some of the cheekiness and playfulness of previous releases.

It’s generally fast, often squelchy, with a endearing lean to the analogue, most succinctly represented by tracks like arpeggio-lead “Trip To Heaven”. Some tracks feel more like a 90’s throwback than others, and there’s a lovely electro vibe in “Feel Like” that can’t go unmentioned.

It’s instrumental, with minor exceptions- a few single-word snippets, like “concentrate!” in the slightly tougher-edged “See You!”, but mainly when the unmistakable voice of Miss Kittin adorns “Daydreamer”. It’s a dreamy and mature spoken-word, almost whispered lyric with intelligence and introspection.

Coming out on the All You Can Beat label that Housemeister co-founded, this all feels like home turf, nothing particularly outrageous or experimental, but nevertheless a really nice pack of high-energy positive techno.

The debut solo album from microtonal tuba player and composer Martin Taxt, a duet with Inga Margrethe Aas on viola da gamba and double bass, sits in a middle ground between classical solo and drone. It’s melodic, but many of the notes are so long and so sustained that they start developing their own drone-line textures.

It’s a single 35-minute piece that layers up live and studio recordings, with a reactionary concept at the core where the performers respond to the previously recorded layers. Perhaps the most striking parts are the pauses- while some drone works deliberately avoid stopping for breath, this work has several points where the tone ebbs away into silence or near-silence before gradually returning for another, different wave. Exposing the creaking tones of studio furniture adds extra texture at the top.

Taxt recently finished a masters degree in Music & Architecture, and this work is described as a tribute to the Japanese tearoom and the tatami mat- but if anything it seems to describe slightly larger, emptier rooms, studio spaces, or some kind of geometric cave. It’s a lovely nuanced bit of work that brings character and a sense of storytelling with tones normally used in flatter, more open drones, and it does it all rather nicely.

Inspired by a Hans Zimmer quote about using more synthesizers, Julia Bondar set out to make “Industrial Symphony” a techno work with an ambitious and dramatic feel. But rather than going for all-out synthetic orchestral tones, melodrama and soundtrack styles, this release stays firmly in techno territory and lets this intention come out in the dark atmospherics, unsettling and biting tones and bass drones, while the drum programming stays steady and provides the scaffolding.

There’s plenty of Zimmer-like tension in tracks like “Fire”, a collaboration with the gothic tones of Nero Bellum, or the stretched-out bass punches and waves of “Overflowing”, and the outro track “Inner” is the one ambient indulgence.
Meanwhile on the album’s softer side some of the tracks have an almost progressive house feel, like that found in “Running With The Wolves” and the nearly-synthpoppy bassline of “Best Intentions”. Techno purists need not worry though, as there is plenty of tough, relentless, purposeful 4/4 to play with in tracks like the darkly unfolding “Power Of Presence”.

It’s a very polished techno album and even though it doesn’t fully reach every one of its rather high aspirations, it’s a slick deep journey that’s worth travelling.

“Late Cretaceous Part 2” is the tenth and final installment of Finnish producer Rantanen’s “Prehistoric series”, 100 tracks released over seven years, each album named after a geological period, each track named after a creature found in that period. In a way it’s quite a high art concept, as well as quite an impressive achievement.

But, and I’ll try and choose my words carefully here to avoid offence, there is little that is high-concept art about the actual music, which is hard, percussive, driving techno through and through. Kick drums are the bread and butter, the subbass is rich, the top end effects and atmospherics are reverberant and generally a bit sinister, and it’s all essentially one-note and mostly amelodic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s high quality- but this is music the dinosaurs might have danced to (not really of course), rather than music that would’ve got them thinking (and not just because of the size of their brains).

It’s nicely mesmerising, as good deep techno should be, with a transportative feel to tracks like “Titanoceratops” or the slightly more epic and progressive “Tyrannosaurus Rex” that wraps the whole journey up.

Across 82 minutes it’s a fairly relentless listen, with relatively few changes in tempo or tone to note, and some similarly-tuned sequential pieces can be a bit of a patience test- “Brachyceratops” is perhaps a low point for the impatient. However, highlight moments and interlude moments include the moody breakdown moments in “Quaesitosaurus”, and the marginally more melodic and successfully broody “Maastrictian”. “Achelousaurus” teases with an equally broody, ambient introduction- that lasts all of ten seconds before the kicks jump in.

It’s techno that runs deep, geologically deep. It’s very smartly produced. Some people may wish for a little more progression in the details to keep them interested- there’s a certain irony in the lack of evolution within the tracks, given the evolutionary scale of the titles- but as low-key techno goes, this is rich.

“Coronal Mass” is a pair of long drone works from Swiss multi-disciplinarian three-piece Strom|morts. Low, coarse synthetic bass tones dominate, while waves of other sounds- spacier and sci-fi pads, industrial hisses, occasional crashes and bangs, the odd tinnitus-tingling high note, an electric guitar cameo here and there, and so on- ebb gradually over the top.

With the Alpine connection, they are pitched as “dronemountains”, and the soundscape is certainly thicker than some droneworks- but equally, there is a certain sparseness at play as well, and these are far from being true noise walls. Variously it can sometimes feel like an expression of the top of a mountain where the air is thin, or sometimes more deep space-ish.

The release contains 2CD’s, one containing the track “Ejection”, the other “Injection”. Both tracks could’ve easily fit on a single disc, as the total run time is barely 33 minutes, but the conceptual idea of the infinite loop, and no beginning or end, represented in the artwork from Swiss artist Helge Reumann and even in the palindromic artist name, is behind the two-disc approach where no particular track is first or last. It has to be said there isn’t a spectacular amount of difference between the two tracks anyway- “Injection” has some more overt repeated synth notes and percussive crashes that almost slip into rhythm, as well as a guitar-heavy section about halfway through that slips into post-rock, but the drone tone dominates both equally.

It’s a well executed drone work with a relatively familiar set of ingredients, but executed with polish and professionalism amd ready to take you on a slow journey.