- Imre Kiss's debut was hardly without precedent. As per its title, Midnight Wave was a collection of techno nocturnes, its shadowed spaces and tape-fogged textures recalling the dreamier fringes of the Opal Tapes camp (fittingly it appeared through Farbwechsel, the label of Opal Tapes regular S. Olbricht). But the Budapest producer stood out through his diversity—raddled IDM and soft-focus new age were explored with equal skill—and his ability to gather this range of styles into a convincing whole.
As such, you could argue that Kiss's latest record doesn't play to his talents. Raw Energy is much more straightforwardly a techno record, albeit a deviant one (opener "Stellar 0102" doesn't find its kick drum until the closing 30 seconds). Several different routes onto the dance floor are explored. "Non" is retro-futuristic techno of the Legowelt school; similarities to the Hague veteran are uncomfortably close at the opening, but they diminish as things become ever more smudged. The heavy-lidded deep house of "Spellbound" is reminiscent of the Nous label at its best, though the anaesthetised vibe is even more extreme, its chords sagging like the head of a snoozing airline passenger. In places Kiss overreaches a little—"Raw Energy (ARPOS Session)," in particular, aims for the epic but ends up exhaustingly over-compressed. But otherwise the main danger is that, with all its subtlety and soft edges, Raw Energy will slip by unnoticed. You'd be wise not to let that happen.
TracklistA1 Stellar 0102
A2 Non
A3 Spellbound
B1 Raw Energy (ARPOS Session)
B2 Belief