The Kind of Techno We Deserve : Black Girl / White Girl's 'Hallucin8'
On my never-ending quest to find techno that doesn’t give me what my doctor calls “anxiety squirts”, I’ve been keeping up with different tech-y releases that blend the genre’s characteristic booming four-to-the-floor doom-and-gloom kick with other forms of sound palettes.
Look, I’m more of a house / garage / chill music kinda guy, but papa likes to dance, and techno usually gets the party started, so papa gotta broaden his horizons a little bit. (In this context, I’m papa, btw. I’m worried that didn’t come across.)
Among the techno artists that are rocking my world at the moment, there’s the Amsterdam duo Black Girl / White Girl. Their album Hallucin8 just came out, and I’ve been listening to it whenever I feel dejected, which is to say, pretty much 24/7.
The album has 4 tracks, so sit back and let me give you a little tour of the EP and share what I like about each and every one of the beats on this release.
Skin On Skin starts things off fiercely. It’s articulated around a simple kick and closed hi-hat pattern, which is soon augmented by a bouncy synth. I always try to look at the first track of an album as some kind of declaration of intent. What are the artists saying? What kind of story are they trying to tell? Are they trying to build expectations, or maybe create a misdirection?
In the context of the album, Skin On Skin creates tension, and lets you know that Hallucin8 will be something a little different.
Microdotz builds on that momentum, going further, and exploring more familiar territories. With its percs and its booming bass, it’s more of a club-ready track, but it still cultivates this weird, very raw aesthetic. I like how the duo mixes the sounds in a really punchy way, in this small, “dead” space. It makes me feel as if the music was millimeters away from my face. Impossible to ignore; hard not to get caught up in.
Throughout the album, there’s also this very interesting use of synth tones, which sound like they were generated from an oscillator, and then injected straight into your skull. I think a lot of producers add effects and filters to make something sound interesting, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
It’s cool to hear an artist that ditches the artifice to create a sophisticated result.
Range Of Vision continues on a similar wavelength, but this one is more of an acid laboratory, with its squelchy 303-type lead. At this point, the album starts to feel like a DJ mix made from scratch and perfectly tuned just for you.
The tracks flow from one to the next, as if Black Girl / White Girl wanted to attack their vision from every possible angle and show us the possibilities of their inner rhythm through the lens of classic electronic music genres.
If Range Of Vision is the acid track of the record, Bad Moon Rising is definitely a spin of bouncy global EDM. Relentless conga? Check. Boisterous horn-like synth notes? Got ‘em. Hypnotizing drops? You bet.
This is your thinking-person festival anthem, and I’m ready to challenge to a twerk-off anyone who says otherwise.
My verdict, you ask? Well, I think Black Girl / White Girl’s Karin and Ty have used their experience as party-starting DJs to inform their work as producers. I’m guessing the hours they’ve put in at the club, honing their craft from Bristol to Tel Aviv, have helped them distill the essence of their dance music down to its most absolutely bare and efficient expression.
Anyone can throw stuff at an Ableton Live timeline with a maximalist approach, but figuring out what to take out, when and where to take it out, and basically, how to chisel down a groove without affecting it’s trance-inducing powers…
When you have that, you have something really special.
For more info, check out Black Girl / White Girl’s SoundCloud.