- He's only been around for a couple of years, but young German Roland M Dill has already become a firm partner of Trapez, having released all of his material though the label or Trapez Ltd. It's no surprise, as his skippy, minimal-inflected tech house that throws drumbeats liberally off the mark to unexpectedly create unfeasible amounts of groove is right at home on the club-functional label.
"Broadband," however, is one of his most pounding yet. In going this route, he sacrifices some of the quirkiness from the likes of last year's Baked Potato to make room for the straightforward growling bass and repetitiveness of the synth shrieks which bore straight through your cranium. That's not to say it doesn't have personality: The grainy choppiness of his drums are still there, and still pretty unique. The playful inventiveness—and value—is mostly on the B-sides, though, with "Shadow Winston" being a bouncy number that might evoke silly dancing and "Phantom Ship Island," the most individualistic thing here. On that latter track a psychedelic rhythmic mash of what sounds like randomly chosen samples, drums or otherwise, churns underneath sci-fi ambience and spacey reverbed bell noises.
Harvey McKay slides the meter from tech house further towards techno, with a darker dub mix sizzling with circuit bent sounds and broken speaker hoots. His non-dub remix, meanwhile, keeps the prominent two-note riff and storms ahead, taking the original to its logical hard-ass conclusion.
Tracklist 01. Broadband
02. Shadow & Winston
03. Phantom Ship Island
04. Broadband (Harvey McKay Dub Mix)
05. Broadband (Harvey McKay Remix)