- An impressive album covering the full spectrum between peak-time and afterhour.
- Since at least 2018, HVL has been on a roll. A resident DJ at Bassiani in Tbilisi, he's the best known artist in one of the world's best techno scenes. As a producer, he's kept up a crazy rate of production, with three albums out in barely three years. The first two, Ostati and Rhythmic Sonatas, established a delicate, emotive style of techno that he's still honing today. Alignment, his latest, hits the same heights as those records, but on a larger scale. Released last month on Bandcamp with a pay-what-you-want price scheme, it packs in 19 tracks and more than two hours of playtime.
Luckily, this is music that works well in large doses: dreamy and uplifting, all soaring rhythms and twilit atmospheres. It's also impressively dynamic. The rhythms are diverse across the record, flirting with elements of electro and IDM, never settling for a standard techno stomp. The sounds are the same ones HVL's been using for years—techno, electro and acid, with hints of IDM, ambient and minimal—though he finds new levels of expression with them here. The drums are crisp and lean, the squiggly acid lines rich with feeling. The tracks never end up where they started, or where you'd expect them to. Often one loop will run from beginning to end, providing a hypnotic mantra while the other elements change around it. (For DJs, it's a fun album to mix through, with each track contrasting elegantly with all the others.)
If there's a single element that runs through Alignment, it's a dual sense of both freedom and longing. Spacious reverb and soaring rhythms create a vast sense of space, but also a sense of great distance. Minor chords and ever-so-slightly sad melodies suggest something on your mind. HVL is that rare techno artist whose music, DJ-friendly as it is, has a potent introspective quality, using club sounds to convey subtle aspects of inner experience. This is what gives his records their spark, and this time around, helps Alignment pass the strange litmus test all dance music faces these days: in a time when clubs have never felt more distant, it resonates in the day-to-day.
Tracklist01. Epil
02. K01b
03. Luca Patch
04. H1 M-del Tskoba
05. U0202phas
06. Prosthetic Brain
07. K00
08. Bseqya
09. Hola Drive
10. Mouth (Horoom X)
11. Marchasid_lim
12. U1202
13. Dead End
14. Lush Breeze
15. Decapad
16. Wilburn Tribute
17. Limg Melody
18. Belated Acid
19. Temp Thought