- On the face of it, BNJMN and Best Available Technology seem an unlikely pairing. Granted, both have approached techno from oblique angles. But Portland's B.A.T. delights in brutal, sometimes ugly collisions with the form, while the Berlin-based BNJMN prefers his sounds bright and pretty. The pair's first collaborative release documents a musical dialogue that has been going on for some years. It's possible, perhaps, to detect two distinct visions tugging against one another, but it's pleasingly difficult to tell who did what, or in which direction these tracks were going before being frozen in digital amber. Are we heading towards techno convention, or away from it?
Regardless, De/Re-Constructions does a good job of shoring up each producer's weaknesses: BNJMN's tendency to overload his tracks with detail, BAT's to go frustratingly off-piste. These 11 tracks are diverse, inventive and buoyant (the only dark moment is "Raw Idler," whose chilly textures are disturbed by what could be the beeps and whirs of a forklift truck). They're concise too, sometimes to a fault: the woozy slow-mo loops of "Things Go" and "Slake," and the 50-second "Bed Cult," are pleasant but needless detritus. Elsewhere, things get meatier. "Wired," with its smeared chords and swaying bassline, sidles towards dub in a manner similar to Peaking Lights. "Lair" and "Bolt" flirt with techno, both brief but rich with pearlescent detail. Perhaps surprisingly, the pair's biggest triumph is their most conventional: "Tred," a whimsical deep house number with just the right amount of skip and bump.
Tracklist01. Wired
02. Things Go
03. Ghosting
04. 022
05. Tred
06. Raw Idler
07. Bolt
08. Bed Cult
09. Rift
10. Slake