CD Feature/ Pridon: "Apnea Eina"
TobiasI once read the interesting statement that techno was the perfect realisation of a single musical idea. With regards to that definition, you can now do two things: Either ponder it for some time, gauge its validity and apply its implications to what you know and appreciate about the genre. Or listen to “apne eina” and forget you ever heard it instead.
Effectively, Petros Voudouris presents a new form of freestyle on his second full-length album, an approach which is refined to the bone but flows in a progressive pulsation, never resting in one place for too long before swiftly moving somewhere else, infused by an obsessive desire to change, morph and transcend strict regulation. His tracks often seem to build from scratch like regular club tunes, but then a disruptive sound will explode from within its structures or a new pattern will establish itself out of nowhere, taking the piece to entirely new horizons.
Putting this album on to dream away in your armchair is therefore not the best way to get most out of “apnea eina” – on the other hand, you will be hard pressed to find a DJ willing to give these tracks a spin. Despite the various styles of dance-oriented music which have made an impact on the Pridon-sound, the entire production, which stresses texture and timbre more than drums and linear development, defies their laws. Even a massively beat-oriented track like “Who are you?” with its theme-like, one-sentence vocal sample and pounding bass-punches, is more occupied with shifting and rearranging the synthesizer pads lusciously wrapped around its percussive propulsion than building a trance.
Voudouris also doesn’t mind going soft on many occasions, displaying a marked preference for warm bell- and chime-sounds, integrating them into the friendly alien-blubbertronica of “One of the last Doctors” or using them as a means to attain a cosmic groove on “Here be Dragons”. The atmospheric side to his personality also comes to the fore on two conscious or unconscious tributes to the Berlin-school of Electronics, when he delves into spacey Latin sounds, counterpoints pronounced metronomic hihats with an ominous choir or digs out analog sequencer patterns Klaus Schulze would have been proud of in the late 70s.
In the final third of the album, Voudouris puts his teeth in more, creating starker contrasts, darker moods and more aggressive settings, but he never deviates from his uncompromising scheme of following his gut feeling. On the other hand, he quietly sings the record to sleep with the otherwordly lullabye of “Keweed”, sounding out “apnea eina” in the softest possible way. A perfectly realised vision this album is, but there are more ideas here than on some techno labels’ entire backcatalogue.
By Tobias Fischer
Homepage: Pridon
Homepage: Low Impedance Records
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