- Jensen Interceptor teams up with 12 collaborators for a record of industrial strength, globetrotting electro and techno.
- It took a little while, but Mikey Melas, AKA Jensen Interceptor, found himself at the right place at the right time. When he started making techno and electro with an industrial bite in the early '10s, he wasn't getting much traction. This was the era of the lo-fi house boom (a genre he also toyed with), when the vibes were sleepy and the drums were caked in dust. But right around the time his debut LP dropped on Maceo Plex's Lone Romantic label, tastes started changing. Out: algorithm-baiting goofy DJ monikers. In: gritty electro and EBM-adjacent techno. This was when Helena Hauff and DJ Stingray began to show up as headliners with increasing frequency, and Melas's sound finally started resonating with a larger and larger audience.
Melas hasn't seemed particularly fussed about jumping on bandwagons. "I guess things happen in cycles," he told Mixmag in 2019. "The Jensen sound you hear now is just a byproduct of a sound I’ve never grown tired of. Maybe that's my curse or my cross to bear."
True to his word, after the electro and EBM goldrush, Melas has stuck to his guns, turning out some of the fiercest and toughest rave-ready electro around. But that doesn't mean he's not willing to try new things. On Jensen & Friends, a sort of album, sort of compilation where he collaborates with 12 different producers on 12 absolute bangers, electro is the grounding grammar. But he conjugates it into unexpected cases, from little flecks of starry-eyed trance to the chest-rattling heft of baile funk.
The collaborators on Jensen & Friends cross geographical and generic latitudes and longitudes, from Turkey to Colombia, from Detroit techno to dubstep. But what all the tracks share is Melas's love of rave stabs, ferocious 808 programming and basslines that cut like a guillotine through butter. How Melas and his collaborators play with that formula changes from track to track. There's an excellent run of baile funk-inspired numbers with producers like CRRDR, Kenya20hz and Dagga. On these three, Melas's usually blown-out recordings are polished into a high-definition shine and swaggers along with a syncopated swing. But as glossy as "Teach Me" with Dagga is, the two also add a porn sample that's been contorted to sound as enjoyable as getting a root canal without Novocaine. When Melas and CRRDR come together on "LA PLATA," there are some hair-raising chords that would have sounded right at home at some warehouse rave off London's motorway circa 1992.
It's not all heaving kicks and warehouse fare. On "Sending My Love," Melas and Lawrence Lee add some prog-ish synth work and a killer snare pattern, turning it into a corroded take on Radiant Love-style trance. "Sending My Love" with Kue adds a dubstep-esque bassline that has the gravitational pull of a black hole on "NÃO SE ASSUSTE." The walls of feedback midway through "Cheetera" with Prequel Tapes sound like Kevin Shields handling the high-end for a Dopplereffekt record.
Listening to Jensen & Friends, I kept thinking about the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Across 13 stanza fragments, Stevens provides different snapshots of a single bird. These fragments differ in tone, timbre and texture, but taken together offer a striking portrait, held together by a central image. Melas, at least as far as I can tell, has no interest in birds. But on Jensen & Friends, alongside his collaborators, he provides us with 12 ways of listening to rough-and-ready electro and techno.
Tracklist01. Werk iT feat. AMX
02. Direct Drive feat. Assembler Code
03. LA PLATA feat. CRRDR
04. Teach Me feat. Dagga
05. Bludgeon feat. estoc
06. SARRA HA HA feat. Kenya20hz
07. NÃO SE ASSUSTE feat. Kue
08. Sending My Love feat. Lawrence Lee
09. que corte feat. MALO2K
10. Skembbe feat. Nene H
11. Cheetara feat. Prequel Tapes
12. Alien Patience feat. Sinistarr