REITEN 0.007 by Kosei Fukuda

The seventh EP on Reiten opens up a new series of releases that together form a continuous, incrementally evolving pattern of musical and visual concept. On the one hand, the records seven and eight jointly create an album-length techno-structure whose rhythmic and mood patterns fit and complement each other just like the covers of the two vinyl do. On the other hand, the 0.007 EP can also be seen as the beginning of a larger evolving whole, since the ninth and the tenth also form a two-record structure of sorts, while the release 0.011 acts as the coda for the five piece series. Even though the interlocking covers are variations on the same graphic theme used throughout the series, each record pushes the development of sound in a different direction. They all work a bit like side trips from the same center of gravity.

The opening track here – “Butterfly Dancers” – is a relentless soundtrack for something like the first dance of electronic moths with their black wings on overdrive and their drone hum everywhere in the air. Put it on repeat and you’ll get the point. It sounds as if the imaginary digital insects try to reach a distant and equally ficticious strobe light. Less metaphoprically, this is a proper big room techno-scape that deserves a most energetic club space. Things get less busy and less insistent on B side where “Dub Dungeon” subdues the atmosphere a bit without reducing the tempo. If anything, it slightly picks it up, as though the music found itself to be on a perfect downward track leading toward a deep dancefloor fulfilment. This piece features a more spacious sonic environment (dub) and a more subterranean feeling beat (dungeon), creating a kind of tension which does not need to be resolved at all. It just flows so well you actually wish the track were much longer than it actually is.

But then “SWIMS” picks up where the previous cut leaves off, only to plunge the listener into still deeper, more claustrophobic recesses of the dark, underground techno. It’s a take-no-prisoner four-to-the floor with a prison-like toughness to it. Occasional background sounds are reminiscent of industrial ambience. But as they pierce the track with their distant mechanical echoes, they never quite dispell its dense electronic haze. Rather, they are like enigmatic harbingers of what’s to come on the following EP, where these shards and fragments become a bit more recognizable as voices in a paranoid séance experience. It’s an abstract soundtrack to most concrete of dancefloors.


Dominik Bartmanski
Berlin, June 2020