New releases this week: Techno (すべて)

Review: Derral is a young and exciting producer based just outside Barcelona. But if you didn't know that and were to judge purely off his music then you would assume he was some Italian producer from the 90s who had been digging in his archives for some unreleased material. These are lo-fi, dreamy house tracks with a real sense of bang but also quality emotional depth. 'Tree Man' is particularly glorious with its neon details and old school piano chords while 'State of Mind' brings a touch of acid to a jacked up Chicago house beat.

Review: Made famous for their mammoth mammary Brainiak-issued sophomore record Blow (1996), The Infinite Wheel came in 1996 as the North London based ambient trance collab of James Johnson and Mark Smith. Many a psychedelically tinged downtempo record would just as easily sporulate across the likes of Nu Groove and R&S, but it was this Brainiak exclusive from 1994 that really took the edible. 'Java Dub' is a psychic dub breakthrough, with its steamtrain bells and eighth note expansions making for a proper tonal tunnelling. 'Enviro', just as it was, has us puckers our lips to its ambient acidic sours, as cascades of percussive pulsion rain down like disembodied parts of a collective self.

Review: In the formative years of his career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ricardo Villalobos frequently utilised a handful of alternative production aliases - first Minta Spacew (one EP way back in 1993) and then more frequently Richard Wolfsdorf. Tia, first released way back in 2000, was the Chilean minimal maestro's second outing under that alias and has become a sought-after EP in recent times - hence this Rawwax reissue. A-side 'Echt Rot' is typically Playhouse-era Villalobos, with cut-up vocalisations, odd noises and spaced-out electronic snippets riding a crunchy minimal-house beat and looped, mind-mangling TB-303 bassline. Title track 'Tia' features simmering orchestral samples clustering around a typically wonky, stripped-back beat, while 'Feurwasser' sounds like the blueprint for many of his later minimal techno workouts.