stephen beaupre

Foe Destroyer

Techno albums are notoriously hard to get right, I mean what do you do if you're a techno artist and you're prepping your album? Do you put together a selection of more downbeat tracks and risk alienating your club-hopping audience or do you plonk together your biggest party hits and risk releasing a cd that nobody will realistically ever play at home? The key is in getting the mix just right, and that's something that few ever manage to pull off. Mutek's Stephen Beupré clearly realises this and has delicately put together an off-kilter album which combines leftfield sampling and electronica influences with purist 4-to-the-floor minimal techno. It works too, the risk with relying heavily on samples in this context is sounding like you're aping Akufen, but Beupré manages to carve out a niche for himself over the course of the album's one hour running length. Sadly at about the half-way mark the record loses a little of the promise heard on the opening tracks, relying more on booty shaking synthesized techno than the 'anything goes' sampled approach, but still this is a sterling effort from a very promising artist.