- Precision techno with an orchestral flair.
- Adrian Sandoval is one of those techno producers who seems to live, eat and breathe the genre. He hews close to a sleek, darkly-tinted techno sound and releases a staggering amount of it on his own imprints Modularz and Developer Archive. (Other labels he's appeared on include Semantica and Mote-Evolver, to give you an idea.) In the world of Developer, techno is dark, dystopian and sometimes suffocating, but never to the point of posturing or self-parody. To wit, Sandoval once released a three-hour techno album that somehow worked all the way through. With so much music coming all the time, it can be hard to know which records to check out, savour or cherish, but new album Muted Icons offers something more solid to grasp onto, with nine tracks of slamming techno reinforced with a pseudo-orchestral heft.
No matter how dark these tracks feel, there's usually some light underneath. Take "Everyone Everywhere," which first focuses on an eerie glockenspiel loop—shades of John Carpenter. But behind it emerges a brassy synth pattern that could have been sampled from a hardstyle record, offering a glimpse of today's trendy ultra-hard techno without ruining the brooding Developer sound. "Ethnic Rooted," meanwhile, features long sustained notes that sound like battle cries, while "The Kind" is downright catchy, pairing an earworm of a melody with kinetic, seductive kick drums.
"The Kind" is paired with "The Rude," which centers on a discordant, shrieking string section, adding another layer to the horror movie vibes of Muted Icons, a style of techno gothic in line with fellow Angelenos like Silent Servant. Best of all is "Atlantic Discussion," which moves with the sheer terror of a Penderecki composition. Using dissonance and discordance instead of sheer brute force, Sandoval achieves a different kind of hard techno on Muted Icons, a style he's been meticulously refining for over a decade.
Tracklist01. Ancestral Communication
02. Everyone Everywhere
03. Ethnic Rooted
04. Atlantic Discussions
05. Tough Touch
06. Everything Vibrates
07. The Rude
08. The Kind
09. Prevailing Aesthetic