David Blue

Anima Mundie

Vril is a proper noun, but is it place or pres­ence? I’m always booted off-sched­ule to some­where altered when­ever he’s around, where the panning ticks[?] are biased a frac­tion of a degree too pastly, delay­ing a false local disori­en­ta­tion akin to the sound of a dozen chore­o­graphed kinder­garten tap dancers’ feet next to one’s head, mildly dura­tion-compressed. Techno as a whole has become quite comfort­able with the prac­tice of orbit­ing high frequency percus­sion in elon­gated ellipses around the stereo picture, which I’ve adored and defended since day 1. My hypothe­ses: it’s actu­ally a cheap play on the psycho­log­i­cal desire of club­bing masses to justify their time out with a profound purpose: it’s an easy cheat to keep the listener’s imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment feel­ing expan­sive, reflec­tive, and there­fore mean­ing­ful. I, myself prob­a­bly enjoy its threat­en­ing aura of immi­nent contigu­ous indus­trial emer­gency, but Vril’s inter­pre­ta­tion has always sounded uniquely adapted; only metic­u­lously retouched, as per his status quo.

The first reac­tionary think­ing I had to work through upon giddily settling in to expe­ri­ence Monday’s release the 80-minute Anima Mundi

casts just enough deeply ponder­ing, brow-wrin­kling sinis­ter intent to take him one hundred percent seri­ously, which defines the core contrast of today’s release of Anima Mundi with the past staples of his live sets, which have become my very favorite access­points into core techno’s distant culture for less-than-taste­ful, very self-absorbed justi­fi­ca­tion.

Friend­ship with a Real Life Detroit techno producer solid­i­fied my appre­ci­a­tion for the language as a whole, so I did put in the hours to inter­mit­tently make my way through a respectable explo­ration of its poten­tial abra­sions and bodily acti­va­tions when I could find them. With­out any poten­tial access to spaces like the envi­ron­ments in which these releases are mani­fested and expe­ri­enced, though, my adult­hood context for explor­ing the current techno palette has rapidly dimin­ished, so I am left no cho partic­u­lar dialect, is just really fuck­ing reso­nant with the format my musi­cal mind processes rhythm, (or was it the Hype Lobes that

Vril’s sound is not alto­gether gamechang­ing, yet it’s more distinctly his than any other white label the discon­nected ear tends to encounter in the only janky jour­neys avail­able, thanks to a virtu­ally nonex­is­tant incen­tive for the Berghain Busters to bother with evan­gel­i­cally distrib­u­tive infra­struc­ture. Elec­tronic musi­cians are just melodic soft­ware program­mers, right? And since what they make can’t be ART, who wants to see a DJ outside the club, anyway? Well, I fuck­ing do, which makes Vril’s ulti­mate perme­ation of nightlife indus­try prison walls a matter of personal risk. That’s why the occa­sion of his Band­camp page’s appear­ance in my inbox wear­ing Daniel Martin Diaz’s gorgeous vector-graphic, vaguely space­go­ing art and bonus banner anima­tion made me scream for joy on the Monday morn­ing bus — the next Vril album release had long been my Deep­est Techno Wish.

It’s the way his assets traverse their virtual space, regu­larly supple­mented by liberal use of robust music theory in complex break and altered process layer­ing to spin a very tick­ling expe­ri­ence for those of us with the right power­less­ness to rhyth­mic emotional dicta­tion. What I’m really trying to say: For any other uncon­sciously bunt punt, hit hit, om soon den ina hah sort of break­beat-manip­u­lated indi­vid­u­als in the dimin­ished dedi­cated techno listen­er­ship, Vril is a very good techno musi­cian.

The true bril­liance of his craft, going forward will lie is in the balance of his compo­si­tional acuity to carry its theo­ret­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion unde­tected over the Berghain’s piss-catch­ing door­sills and even further through the prud­ish cowardice now brew­ing in the tastemak­ing systems of the aging white relics from his medium’s golden age with­out peak­ing off their alarmed conscious thresh­olds.

It’s frus­trat­ing

Unfor­tu­nately, the only outlooks await­ing the result of his work Simu­la­ta­noeously , in the expres­sive, culture-cotribut­ing sense

Oh wa a a a a .… even prose!