- Techno meets hardcore on this EP designed for dance floor chaos.
- There was a time not so long ago that a label like Haven might have risked facing a gale as the winds of taste eventually changed direction. Here's a techno outlet that couldn't be more in line with the hard, fast and noisy movement of recent years, something the names of its records alone—Perspectives From A Sterile Hellhole, Sardonic Tonality, Instinct Primitive / Crash Report—will tell you. There's no doubt dance music is still shaped by trends to a large degree, but have we reached a point where the fragmentation of people's listening habits means there's an ongoing place in the scene for pretty much everything? Is a review of a record called Skull Crushing Techniques Vol.2 the place to ponder this? It's likely Tommy Holohan, the Irish producer behind the EP, was simply concerned with creating as much dance floor chaos as possible, something he pulls off with some quality a couple of times here.
Holohan actually works with another sound du jour on this second EP for Haven: hardcore. There's a helium vocal sample on "Fear What You Don't Understand" that pairs nicely with the track's thundering acid line, while "Trancegression," the release's highlight, has a euphoria-drenched breakdown and a twisted synth line that represent the yin and yang of early '90s raving. As tightly as it's executed, it's hard to see "Father" as anything other than a ravey jungle pastiche. "Unedeuxtrois," the noisy broken techno cut that opens things, mixes intensity and light—its beats crispy and hard, its melody floating in space. The final track, the ambient "Mega D," captures that same mood.
TracklistA1 Unedeuxtrois
A2 Fear What You Don't Understand
B1 Trancegression
B2 Father
B3 Mega D