track 1: i intrinsically trust the judgement of techno producers who come from berlin, but the ambient intro to the album is overwrought and tedious and made me immediately modify my expectations for the album being "minimal."
track 2: this is definitely more of a british murder boys or fanon flowers type of thing than what i'd expect from a berlin-based techno producer. that is, it's less mechanical (or what i tend to think of as "pulsating") and more dance-y and aggressive (this sort of goes along with having "industrial" sounds). it even has these EDM-like production frills where it sounds like it's doing an epic drop or communicating with a hypothetical crowd and telling them to start cheering because there's a building crescendo. but it doesn't fully commit to this to the point where i'd enjoy it like i enjoy jeff mills' tokyo liquid room set which also does things like that.
track 3: this is more along the lines of what i expected and also what i prefer. i'm starting to notice that every track is strangely short, though. i'm listening to the bandcamp stream and almost feel like going and making sure that i'm not being given truncated versions of each track, which is something that i've encountered on bandcamp before. it's not until the track is almost over that all of the rhythmic elements are added, which works against the potential for minimal techno to allow you to fixate on a static rhythm while clearing your mind.
track 4: kind of unremarkable. i'm distracted by having noticed that fanon flowers is actually namedropped in the record label's little bandcamp bio twice. i don't like the modulating effect sounds (when something sounds "shimmery") which is why i also don't really like dub techno very much.
track 5: has a mechanical/pulsating basis but then starts doing all these frilly things like it thinks you'd get bored if the mechanical pulsating was given room to breathe by itself. this, to me, just makes it sound inauthentic and slightly juvenile. i'm not here to "get hype." i have now noticed that the album is only tagged as minimal techno on rym due to the votes of 3 randoms, so it's just definitely not that.
track 6: i guess this is why a couple of people think it's "wonky techno." not really my thing, but some interesting stuff happens around the halfway mark that i do quite like purely due to the sounds being pleasant.
track 7: i like the idea of having an intermission, but an intermission from what? so far the album has been a grab-bag of different approaches and elements and i don't feel accustomed to anything or have any sense of the producer having a unique style or vision. this is also happening at the second-to-last track, and at the same time it feels like i've only been listening to the album for like 15 minutes.
track 8: okay, so the previous track wasn't an intermission, but rather a transition into ambient music. ok
overall: this album tries too hard to keep your attention, like it's targeted at people with ADHD who don't like techno, and it also doesn't really know what it wants to be. it has a sort of introduction like it's a cohesive, intentionally-structured album, but i really don't think it is. it's certainly not autistic "minimal techno," but it also doesn't actually commit to being normie hype music *or* aggressive/violent industrial techno *or* "pretty" shimmery ambient techno -- and i'm not complaining about this because i'm genrebrained and need to put the album into a box, but because constantly shifting between different things prevents the album from feeling like anything is fleshed out or developed, and i also never really feel myself getting "into" the album. we're getting 3-4 minute long tracks that, even within the same tracks, are shifting around the entire time. i think the album is probably like this because the producer was experimenting and learning as he was creating the songs. it's not surprising that this was his debut because it doesn't sound like it was made by someone with much experience in the genre.
