- A commendably low-key producer who's spent the last two years willfully avoiding bandwagons, Steve Schieberl AKA Let's Go Outside is, it's fair to say, something of a "techno outsider," and responsible for some of Soma Records' most promiscuous offerings to date. This release—the first from his new label Slant—proves no exception, doggedly refusing to fit into any obvious templates.
Title track "Bicycle Day" is a rousing piece of warped, mid-tempo motor techno, simultaneously anthemic and unsettling. Metallic sheets of bass, spanking claps and bright, electrified shards of melody collide joyously but precariously, periodically flirting with structural collapse but kept ruthlessly in order by a pummeling 4/4 kick. Dropped at the right time, it'll send people nutty.
"Negative Space" takes things deep into the rave zone, a racing, heads-down exercise in pitch-black dancefloor functionality—all paddling kicks and thick, spangled chords—which nevertheless contains moments of striking musical intensity. Faceless but dramatic, it's the sort of track that punctuates a night without ever really lodging in one's memory. Lone B-side "Exercise for Snails" (cue farcical mental images) completes the bill. A squelchy acid workout littered with what sounds like the unwanted debris from a host of previous studio sessions, it's by far the creepiest cut on show, and epitomizes the gutsy approach Schieberl has adopted with this record.
TracklistA1 Bicycle Day
A2 Negative Space
B Exercise For Snails