Mykja – Climate Change
Mykja’s Climate Change presents a suite of dub techno that’s not afraid to use quite a bit of spiky shrapnel in the mix, or to strongly misuse a Nick Cave line, every now and then, a steeple tears the stomach from a lonely little cloud. That means it is not content to just bliss you out. There are clicks and cuts here that get sharp, like standing barefoot on a piece of Lego.
Sometimes the clicks become too present in the mix to the point it’s all I focus on – but I’d rather have an artist dance around the genre than Xerox a generic copy of Deepchord, CV313 or any number of Berlin schools. And what I’ve heard from Etoka records before, I liked. They seem to offer a precise, unfussy but well-crafted tweak and turn on dub techno. I have a digital copy of Magnitude by Faidel & Warmth and I think this one will grow on me likewise. So, Climate Change has some nice moments, the work sits between an EP and a full-lengther – and it’s not just clouds of static and washes – the reverb and echoes sometimes drops completely out of the mix – and it’s nice to be shown the wiring under the board, even if it is only for a flash.
While it’s hard to say what’s been the source of sounds here, it sounds high quality, digital and sort of neo-analog. It’s clean – maybe a bit too clean – but about half way in there’s a beautiful bit of bounce in Operation Popeye (even a bit Dr Alex Paterson here folks!) before we pass through the final pair of tracks. Cloud Seeding is potentially rubbing shoulders with an obscure Plaid track and Storm Summoning has a return to some dub, but by now we’ve become asymmetrical – which is a good thing.
