various / 14 tracks

14 tracks: from the outside looking in

This week we take another look at Techno's outer limits, bringing together all manner of destroyed, out-of-time, washed-out and fragmented warehouse appropriations made by producers free of the constraints of beat-count and structure. We already dipped-in a few months back with "14tracks Of Psychotic repetition", but we now fully submerge ourselves in a sound which has slowly come to define 2011. We start with the pioneers and 1995's seminal Fridge Trax from General Magic and Pita, a singular piece of conceptual reproduction which still sounds as brilliantly out-of-sorts as it did almost two decades ago. Fellow aural agitators Farmers Manual pick up the challenge with their 1996 opus "No Backup", before tracing ley lines out and back into the 21st century as we drop in on Pete Swanson and Dominick Fernow, two gifted producers from the noisiest extremities of the scene who made their names with the Yellow Swans and Prurient projects respectively. Patten, Sculpture, Diamond Catalogue (with a little help from Grouper) and KPLR drag us further out into a fog of fractal shapes and non-linear arrangements, pulling us deeper into a beautifully opaque future where genre, definition and precedent count for nothing...