Label
White label
ELGATO001
- Hessle Audio certainly has a talent for showcasing the quiet ones. Joe, Objekt, Pangaea—these producers could probably double their glacial release rates without putting off their fans. Elgato, however, goes one step further, in that even the sonic character of his music seems to indicate fearsome self-restraint, a consideration of every microscopic sonic detail down to the last reverb tail. The results, though, don't sound fiddly or overwrought—quite the opposite in fact. Take his 2010 debut "Tonight," whose aggy London rave signifiers are pushed to such extremes of minimalism that they become almost inert. Or 2012 follow-up "Zone," which was house of a sort, but so subdued that you might have thought it entirely unremarkable—until you came around eight minutes later, glassy-eyed and drooling slightly.
It's Elgato's understanding of the power of minimalism that gives his music its hallucinatory intensity. This 12-inch—the first for his own eponymous imprint—is interesting, then, because it quests towards more conventional forms. "Dunkel Jam," first heard on Ben UFO's 2011 Rinse mix, features all the Elgato trademarks but is maybe the densest thing he's released yet. Its central galloping toms and periodic white noise make it surprisingly frenetic, while the return of the hi-hat after the second drop is a positively maximalist move by Elgato's standards. "We Dream Electric" reconfigures similar elements into a straighter 4/4 number. In fact, it could almost be called conventional (if very high calibre) deep house were it not for its extreme sparseness. As always, Elgato's focus is on the negative space. The yawning gap between crystalline hi-end and body-shaking sub will, over time, exert a magnetic pull on your consciousness.
Tracklist A Dunkel Jam
B We Dream Electric