- Though it only contains six tracks, Reboot's follow-up to 2010's Shunyata clocks in at over an hour in total, stretching the concept of the mini-album to its breaking point. And that's not the only thing German producer Frank Heinrich stretches here: it's a challenge to take Deep V in one sitting without your attention span snapping.
Named after the production alias of Heinrich's late brother, Deep V has just over half as many tracks as Shunyata, and far fewer ideas. It's released on Sascha Dive and Christian Schölzel's Deep Vibes label, though tracks like "Banging Ear Drums" are very much the sound you'd associate with Reboot's past home, Cadenza, with serpentine conga grooves, whirlpools of swooshes and tribal chants. This one just barely stays just on the right side of the line between hypnotic and monotonous, which the rest of Deep V falls well over, dominated as it is by minimal chuggers smattered with Latin percussion.
"How Province Saved The Funk" has a similar tropical atmosphere to Shunyata's opener, "Uruana." Occasional jungle shrieks make it feel like a trek through a darkened rainforest, though if you weren't focusing on these microscopic details the track would seem so empty you'd probably overlook its existence altogether. Still, at least that one actually has interesting details, for elsewhere Deep V is bereft of anything like the snatches of groove and melody that gave past Reboot releases, such as 2007's Charlotte, their character. Heinrich has called his music "complex polyrhyhmic architecture," which in the case of "Tantric Behaviours" seems to translate as music with all the groove of set concrete. Although "Harsh Time For Kids" and "Tortoise" do have tensile basslines in their foundations, they're buried so deep that they hardly give the tracks any lift.
Even if you accept that these tracks are designed more for DJs than home listeners, it's difficult to conceive of them as anything other than filler—something to play while figuring out what to play next. To be fair, with all but one of them over 11 minutes long, at least they give you more than enough time to do that.
Tracklist01. Tortoise
02. Harsh Time For Kids
03. Che Meloni
04. Banging Ear Drums
05. Tantric Behaviours
06. How Province Saved The Funk