mike dehnert: lichtbedingt

Three years after his last full-length album on Delsin, tireless techno producer Mike Dehnert is back. Lichtbedingt counts 12 tracks and is yet another subtle evolution away from the chord-driven, functional sound he has championed before now. Since his last album, Dehnert has continued to steer his Fachwerk label through the techno undergrowth and it has now amassed more than 25 releases in all. At the heart of the label's output has been Dehnert's own increasingly experimental techno and this new album is testament to the producer's continued exploration of the form. Where Framework was, in the words of Mike himself, ''focused on the heavy techno form'," this album explores broken bass, swinging house and beatless electronic experimentalism, amongst other things. The album starts off with a suitably somber intro that features cold, slowly shifting synths. They set an uneasy and moody tone before "Construction" settles into a fat, swaggering cadence. From there you get lost in broken, ruptured, malfunctioning bits of hardware that spit out random hi hats, bleeps and gurgles and then eventually get spat out the other side into a cantering bit of dubwise techno with paranoid vocal snippets. Moving along, the album throws plenty of diverse influences into the mix: "Movement" is freaky and dynamic, skipping and pumping, ducking and diving through all sorts of occult synth sounds and shadowy vocal loops, then "Single Action" is like a sledgehammer groove run through with harmonic elements that glint and glisten like diamonds in the rough. Classic sounding Dehnert tracks like "ReRe" remind us where this producer has come from, while the breezy house swagger of "Emlo" show us where he might be headed. Key to this album and Dehnert's output as a whole is, besides the killer grooves, the production: crisp and clean, full-blooded and always outstanding. CD contains two extra tracks not on the double LP version.