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12"
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TRESOR 371EP
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Growing up on the north Atlantic-island of Iceland bestows one with an unusual and often intense relationship with light and color: Summers come with endless days, Winters with scant sunlight yet increased sightings of the Aurora Borealis; the mysterious and awe-inspiring glow across the sky. Channeling these energies, Exos comes to Tresor with his Green Light EP, a five-track collection of the sort of spectrally rich techno synonymous with the Northman's 27-year career. Across the EP, the five tracks fizz and pulsate driving ever forward, making the release's title a three-way play on words referencing the continuous travelling of photons, the verdant warping of the Northern Lights, and the universal color for Go, for forward propulsion. Smart wordplay can also be found in titles like "Grátt Silfur," a term in Íslenska (literally "grey sliver") which signifies a tension between two parties, further extending the color metaphor and dark/light dichotomy found elsewhere. Green Light EP continues 2024's blazing return from an artist who, similar to his output, is never stagnant: ever changing form yet ever moving forward.
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3LP
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FIGURE 005LP
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Indigo is Icelandic artist's Exos fourth studio album, arriving almost two full decades after his last LP. In the meantime, the seasoned producer has never stopped to refine his production style, mastering an aesthetic that feels at once minimalist and yet richly detailed. Spanning the organic and the electronic, drawing from early dub techno blueprints and comprising the beauty of his austere homeland. From this, Exos expands an absorbing atmosphere, sustaining the primal power of nature within compositions that hold an exalted presence yet never go overboard, instead, they gently push along even in their most intense moments thus vastly transcending the pure club context. The album's thirteen tracks are a sonic bliss to indulge in, each element is crafted so meticulously and balanced with care against its counterparts. Whether the luminous, spaciously glowing opening tracks "Reincarnation" or "I' skjo'li nætur" the then-ensuing hypnotic techno-trips of "Sælu-reitur" and "Quod Arcanum Leticia" and finally the deeply satisfying, dubbed-out backbone of the album's main body -- a series of Exos's signature-style dub-techno cuts that he has been perfecting now for over 20 years. Seeing it all mesh together in this concentrated form, it's the picture of an exceptionally experienced producer pushing himself beyond any limits to achieve his greatest feat yet. When the fog clears and the last tracks slowly roll out, the record leaves as smoothly as it had entered, allowing for reflection and contemplation of one of techno's most exhaustive LP efforts yet to date.
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12"
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FIGURE X003EP
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An established artist since his early minimal and dubbed-out techno productions around the beginning of the millennium, recently re-emerged Exos is now picking up the thread. Building on his first EP on Figure, the Icelandic beatsmith carefully hones his sensibly arranged and richly layered tracks, which then are detached for the pleasure of following their constant evolution. This is intense listening; one is treated to a dive in the deep end of techno and will only come up again with more clarity and focus, simply from having been lost in the groove for what feels like a moment outside of time.
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12"
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STS 003EP
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Yes, this is the same Icelandic dub-techo artist who previously released a bunch of late 90s classics on Force Inc. and Thule. One-sided record (sort of, there is a side 2 -- it has something to do with how marihuana might be a drug), 180 gram RTI pressing, absolutely gigantic sounds. "'Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.' --Walter Benjamin. Self-determination, greatness, eternity. Make your reality and it becomes you. Put your heart and soul into what you love and others will recognize your sincerity, seek you out and reward your brilliance: from this comes greatness and glory, infinite and undeniable -- a fraternity of the eternal. And yet with each successive epoch, the present greatness of our moment, our time, disintegrates and disperse -- becomes the mere stepping stone, the quintessential prerequisite to a future heralded anew as 'the great epoch of our time.' We fight an impossible war for historical cultural supremacy, and we do so blindly and selfishly, determined to achieve that greatness that we know has not yet settled down with one generation immovable throughout time. Secretly we pity these past fetes of culture, assured that ours is the time, the moment of greatness, importance and ultimate historical worth. So our art morphs from what was once practiced at first as a matter of self-fulfillment, personal necessity and fraternal interchange & enjoyment to one of vein self-service & epic self-deceit. When we continue to ignore the fact that art is no longer a social endeavor---that it no longer participates in and affects the real social changes occurring around us, it's vitality inextricably tied to our historical standing -- and allow it to remain autonomous from the very real material conditions that, in no small measure, make up the entirety of our current existence, we willingly clear the path to our own irrelevance, soon to be remembered, at very best, as a shimmering piece of antiquity typical of the old world, one that once held a vital and vivacious beauty in its moment, but nay, no longer, sentenced to the dungeon of the specialists of the past. But, it is too late... for we will soon become they. Slow To Speak returns with their latest label release, pressed on limited 180 gram vinyl w/ Japanese obi."
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