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Various

Out For Lunch

Rip n’Burn (Germany)

More minimal techlectro, this time from new Munich label Rip n’Burn. Kicking off is Trentemoller’s Polar Shift, and it’s bloody tasty: scratchy, tetchy and disparate, it picks up into a motherlode of electroglitch bacon-and-egg sandwiches. Stephan Riedel’s Controlled Body Movements has a great sound to it – funky, deep electro-tinged minimalia that’s somehow sort of reminiscent of the old Baluns and Medium sounds that were coming out a few years back. And it’s got a hell of a nice breakdown in it too.

Neal White & Dereck Turner’s Cry To Save This Song is a beauty, I just love the way this moves. Starting out deceptively low-key, it somehow gathers gargling energy and whips it up into a foaming frenzy… and then, just as it’s about to boil over, it eases back on the pedal, where a billion other tracks would just keep thrashing it. Bjorn Manday’s Phantom is a cruisy little number, with filters galore and a generally blasé attitude to life. In-n-Out’s Musika Automatika does more or less what it says on the tin – it’s a frenzy of caustic electro, layered into a hypnotic groove that stutters, shunts, and blisters its way along. Lipstick from Who’s Who is a belter. Utterly thunderous, with sheer anthemic potential running through it like blue veins through a block of Stilton. Except it’s not so cheesy. It’s simple (mahoosive riff), it’s danceable (drums so smooth you barely notice them), and it’s the sort of tune that has you moving towards the dancefloor and, dare I say it, looking up at the DJ booth.

Tim Track’s Track It Back is straight-down-the-line European techno, violent in its BPM assault rate, and with great filtered-up disco strings bombarding you. Minimal maestro Marc O’Tool has an interesting track in Gear 2, a slomo and pulverised tech groove with what sounds like snapshots of other tunes snaked throughout. Once it’s going, it’s a nice little cracker, but I’d like to hear a less abrasive version – but then maybe I’m a pussy. Vision & Canedy’s Check The Sound is warehouse-grade amyl disco, and pretty tight at that. A hearty, beefy bottomend keeps it nicely grounded and the overall sound is groovily satisfying.

Finally Donato Dozzy & Brando Lupi finish the album with the glitchyfunky Liquid, an understated little number that’s cute enough, but somewhat unmemorable. A theme which, at the end of the day, reflects most of Out For Lunch. It’s a fairly random-sounding collection, that doesn’t really have much of a common thread or cohesion to it. Not bad, but all things considered it’s a pretty awkward, clunky collection.

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