- The Detroit sound in electronic music, as most should know by now, is no sound at all. Monty Luke's Tomorrow EP is further proof. Luke is the label manager of Carl Craig's Planet E, and he just started his own Black Catalogue imprint last autumn. This EP was the first release, and after an extended run as vinyl-only—eight months—it's now open to the digital market, acting as Luke's nod to tradition and the demands of the modern marketplace.
The two sides of this EP do this as well. They sound like they could, technically speaking, have been made in 1990. The pads detune and warble, and each of the instruments occupies its own space. But they each have a clear identity that you might not expect to hear in this kind of thing—at least not today. "Tomorrow" is dank, spacious and blackly futuristic. It has more than a few signatures of early Autechre, including the way the kicks, handclaps and other fragments flit around its periphery. "Yesterday and Today" shares its primitive production aesthetic, but that's pretty much it. It's a big room melodic excursion that might have come from the late '90s. More rigidly laid out than typical Detroit techno, it's not until the chords come in halfway through that you're reminded of exactly where this came from.
Tracklist A Tomorrow
B Yesterday & Today