- iota propels mutant techno into the future.
- The sound palette on PS004 is slick, the construction is clinical and it moves in robotic ways. Zaps and synthesized bleeps feel like they have been created by streams of data. It's not futuristic in the way Juan Atkins or Delia Derbyshire's music is, for example. It's more obvious than that, but it works. These are the kinds of tracks that make you turn to a mate on the dance floor and ask, with your face alone, "What is this madness?"
For a relatively new artist, iota has some impressive production skills. All the elements are finely chiselled and built to test a soundsystem. "Terminus" and "Cloudtek" distil electro and acid techno into stark forms. They were conceived after long nights out in Berlin and you can hear it in their sonic architecture and mind-bending details. The swampy, psy-inspired "Noxi" stands out as the most unpredictable of the three originals. But despite his production chops, iota's music—"Cloudtek" in particular—lacks some organic, human feeling and warmth. The snare in Reptant's remix brings a welcome rawness to an otherwise sanitized environment. Fellow Melbourne-based artist DBR cloaks "Noxi" in reverb and strings out the ideas into more experimental terrain.
TracklistA1 Terminus
A2 Cloudtek
B1 Noxi
B2 Terminus (Reptant's Lizard Tech Mix)
B3 Noxi (DBR Remix)