- Unique '90s mystic rave bangers.
- When the Romanian artist Dan Handrabur moved to Vancouver in the early '90s, he stumbled into a special moment in dance music history that's been mostly overlooked since. A community of artists, many of them gravitating around an afterhour club called World, were combining different sounds in interesting ways, from techno and ambient to things like industrial, dub, downtempo and shoegaze. Handrabur made music with many of them and collected the results on Frequencies From The Edge Of The Tektonic Plate, the first release on his label, Outersanctum. Frequencies was darker and more ethereal than what was coming out of techno's main hubs at the time. It was also, to quote one Discogs user, "criminally ignored by the dance music scene upon its release and ever since." Enter Warsaw's Brutaż crew, who have given it a much-deserved reissue.
Frequencies shows Handrabur teaming up a rotating cast of Canadian artists, from little-known acts, like Deviator and Disturbik, to pillars of the scene like Steve Keddie (AKA DJ Tripswitch) and Phil Western, who appears here as Stellar Sofa, and to whom this reissue is dedicated (Western died last year). Erra, Handrabur's wife and frequent collaborator, sings on many of the tracks, sounding like a spookier Cocteau Twins. With some exceptions—"Injektor (Opaque Mix)," "Which Way To Forever (Cyborg Lounge Mix)"—these tracks don't bang so much as drift. The mood is haunted and mystical, offset by moments of dreamy bliss. It's all there in the first couple minutes of the first track: hissing ambience, a howling wolf, a stumbling kick drum, breaks, acid, and before too long a sad and euphoric melody. That one's called "Neurospora Isolates" by THCOD, an alias that would seem to suggest a weed overdose, but is technically an acronym for The High Council Of Dreamification.
Across the compilation, the rave mystic vibe competes with something darker, reflecting the influence of the industrial music at the time. Snatches of film dialogue, drenched in reverb, sound a lot like Skinny Puppy, one of many bands Western worked with over the years (Download's III, his 1997 album with that band's cofounder, Cevin Key, is another gem of this era). Some tracks have an overtly nightmarish, haunted-house atmosphere. Even the more blissed-out ones feel deeply eerie, like "Aetherius," the collection's 12-minute closer from Western and Handrabur.
It's easy to see what Brutaż liked about Frequencies. This music has the same murky and offbeat quality as the Polish label's original records. Perhaps because they come from cities culturally and geographically removed from club culture's main centers, Brutaż and Handrabur seem to share an ambivalence about house and techno in their standard form, opting instead for something stranger and more ambiguous. Beyond how well it fits on the label, this is a truly inspired reissue, not only lifting these seven tracks from obscurity, but tipping off the listener to a rich network of artists and labels just beyond this release, from the vast catalogs of Handrabur and Western to the many other '90s Vancouver acts not included here. Brutaż, once Warsaw's best party, is now operating purely as a label. If this reissue is anything to go by, we've got a lot to look forward to from them.
Tracklist01. THCOD - Neurospora Isolates
02. H / Erra - Injektor (Opaque Mix)
03. H / Stellar Sofa - Will I Dream?
04. Disturbik / H / Tripswitch - Sensor○E○OD
05. H / Erra - Timekompress
06. H - Which Way to Forever (Cyborg Lounge Mix)
07. Stellar Sofa / H - Aetherius