- No muss, no fuss, just 17 tracks of straight-up techno.
- In the run up to the release of Dust World, the most substantial Matrixxman release since 2015, Charlie Duff has been clear that it's not an LP. "It looks like an album, but it’s not an album. I think of an album as something that’s made from start to finish with that particular purpose in mind," he told Shawn Reynaldo. Dust World, on the other hand, "just sounds like some dark futuristic shit." This captures Duff’s contrarian streak. His debut, the Detroit-referencing Homesick, landed on Ghostly International and was poised to catapult Duff into crossover stardom. But, since then, as Andrew Ryce pointed out, "he swerved towards techno and never looked back." The colossus that is Dust World is his most complete exploration of the genre to date. For close to an hour-and-a-half, Duff plots out techno at its most metallic and austere, underlining how you don't need lightning-fast BPMs to pack a gut-smacking punch.
With the tempo kept below 140 BPM, Duff has two brands of intensity. On the one hand, there are psychedelic meditations that slither across the stereo spectrum—the kind favored by people like Wata Igarashi and Marco Carola—and on the other, what you might call proper bangers. The excellent opening suite of "Neural Lace" and "Saboteur," which feature two of the record's best arpeggios, are firmly in the latter camp. Other highlights in this vein include "The Curious One" and the burbling creep of "The Beacon Recovery," which is a contender for the next Swamp Thing soundtrack.
When it comes to the harder stuff, "Riken Device" stands out, with dense thickets of delay Duff around the snares that make each hit sound like a land mine exploding. "The Heist" which sounds like Donato Dozzy on a British Murder Boys record. But Duff isn't a one-trick pony, and there's enough variation on Dust World to keep even the casual fan immersed. Just wait for the campy strings to hit on "Butterfly Knife" or that muffled lead line, somewhere between a police siren and an ice cream truck, in "Saboteur." And on a track like "Stranded," he offers a needed moment of contrast with its purposely flat and dry affect where the EQ is sucking the life out of his synths.
But still, listening to this not-album, it's hard not ask what Dust World is if not an album? Heck, with a few sequencing tweaks, it would even hit all the usual techno cliches: start with the ambient inhalations of "Don't Look Down" or "The VR Parlour" and end with the alien chitter chatter of "Do You Copy." But maybe this sort of speculation is besides the point. Duff makes some of the best techno out there and Dust World is him at the height of his powers. He can call his releases whatever he wants when the tracks are this consistently strong.
Tracklist01. Neural Lace
02. Saboteur
03. Don't Look Down
04. Caught Lacking
05. Dust World
06. Plan B
07. Airlock
08. Beacon Recovery
09. 1312
10. The VR Parlour
11. Riken Device
12. Butterfly Knife
13. Stranded
14. Do You Copy
15. The Heist
16. The Curious One
17. Mother's Return