- Retrofuturist techno that paints the picture of a world on the brink of doom.
- Tracing Xircles' most recent release Xenolith feels timely. Although Luke Standing and Simon Pilkington (Blue Hour and AJ-X, respectively) may not have intended the EP to land a short while after The Matrix's fourth installment or news of Spotify's CEO investing $133 million in an AI defence technology startup, the release feels like a mirror of this increasingly dystopian moment in technological history.
On this EP Tracing Xircles remold vintage progressive house, jungle and rave styles to match them up with techno's larger-than-life current moment, using reverb to maximum effect. The music sounds huge, but moves with a sense of impending doom. Take the title track. The chords are melancholy, almost stately, but the stuttering vocals and jungle-flavored breakbeats add urgency—it sounds paranoid more than anything else. "Surface Level" is more cartoonish, with bouncy synth strings and a robust low-end that lifts the mood—you could imagine it as the score to a battle scene in an old sci-fi movie.
The halftime drum & bass of "Blindspot" brings the EP to a spaced-out, almost ambient atmosphere, with a more sedate tempo and the occasional pitched-up vocal. Standing and Pilkington intensify this vibe on "Closed Circuit," but there's a ravey aesthetic this time. Yes, the glitchy FX, caustic acid lines and cyborg vocals are still there, but a colossal drop around three-and-a-half minutes in turns it into a peak-time banger despite the moodiness. While Tracing Xircles portray a world on the brink of doom, they do it with color and verve, blasting through the bleakness.
Tracklist01. Xenolith
02. Surface Level
03. Blindspot
04. Closed Circuit