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Echoes is fast becoming one of my favourite labels, and bear in mind that speaking as someone who hasn't really had such a thing as a favourite label since the end of the Tip colours series, this is something to celebrate a bit.
Khainz is Simon Schwendener, best known to psy "nutters" like you and me as Freakulizer -- an act who, up until the recent rather disappointing album, one would associate with tight, flowing fullon that keeps a smile on your face and a beer in your hand.
It's only when I listened to Modul 8 that I managed to get some sense as to why the Freakulizer album was lacking; Simon has put his soul into this project instead, and when you combine talent with this much love, you're pretty much on to a winner.
More often than not, artists publicly ditching psytrance in favour of techno deserve all the abuse we can muster. They're bandwaggoners extraordinaire, going with the flow of the trend and not responding to the artistic compulsion that, deep down inside, we wish all artists felt.
Simon's Khainz project combines this spark of passion with a staggering amount of music confidence. He knows what will work, when it'll work, and why it'll work. The sheer deftness of this will leave you gasping.
Drops drop, sounds flicker, beats gather and effects whirl. The balance is the key here -- between danceability and soul, between effect and restraint, between light and hefty.
Proper afficionados of the minimal techno bubble will no doubt tell me that I'm barking up all kinds of wrong trees here, but whatever. Speaking as someone who minimal normally leaves colder-than-cold, there is in this release some sort of soulful spark that's absent almost everywhere else. And on that level and that level alone, Modul 8 is a recommended release.
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