- For several years now, Belgian label Vlek has been launching from the fringes of the underground beat scene into ever more far-flung territories. These days, their brand of muggy abstraction comes in a variety of packages: Ssaliva's hypnagogia, the forest-floor ambience of Wanda Group, Squeaky Lobster's more conventional hip-hop. Sagat's debut EP, released last year, revealed him to be the label's techno connection. Few Mysteries Solved In A Year Of Contact saw the Brussels-based producer rifle through a number of established techno forms, tackling each adroitly (the title track found its way onto Ben Klock's fabric 66). But it was difficult to shake the feeling that, compared to the highly singular nature of much Vlek fare, Sagat was a little too willing to ape his chosen formulas.
Its follow-up, Satellite, neatly dispatches this criticism. Certainly, similar reference points recur—"Port" is very fine dub techno; "Satellite" a 2-step autopsy in the Shed vein. But in each track there's a pungent, sticky quality to the mix, a taste for fogged chords and muzzy melodic flourishes that sets them apart from their forebears (and also makes them quite distinctively Vlek). "Ten Steps Removed" and "Intruder" take things further. The former is weightless, its hi-hats cutting through thick whorls of ambience; the latter pairs heavily side-chained low-bitrate noise with a cavernous dub halftime. Sagat, it seems, is coming into his own, and the results are fascinating.
Tracklist A1 Intruder
A2 Port
B1 Satellite
B2 Ten Steps Removed