Born in Chicago and now based in Tokyo, electronic producer Joseph Auer has amassed an intimidatingly large discography of releases on labels including Boltfish, Symbolic Interaction and U-Cover since he first emerged with 2004’s Kyoto:Tokyo:2001 release on Rednetic, the label he co-founded alongside Zainetica’s Mark Streatfield. This latest album on Rednetic, Nu Age, follows on from his Freo collection on Symbolic Interaction earlier this year, and sees Auer continuing to fuse distinctly classically-tinged ambient and IDM elements with a lush, understated techno pulse drawn equally from Detroit and Chicago. As the nebula photography of the sleeve art suggests, the primarily focus here is upon lush, ambient techno passages that frequently call to mind the similarly wide-eyed and blissful cosmic excursions of the likes of Higher Intelligence Agency and perhaps even The Black Dog’s more beatific moments.
If opener ‘Warsaw Dawn’ hints at the gentle bleed of the sunrise over the horizon, with clicking, broken IDM breakbeats slowly gathering momentum over a majestic backdrop of lush synth pads, ‘Awake Into A New World’ sees the 4/4 rhythms beginning to lock beneath the blurred out melodic elements and distant thudding quasi-acid squelches. Elsewhere, ‘Circuits’ gets more stripped-back and sinister, dropping the listener into a dense forest of dry-sounding snare programming and juddering bass, before jazzy elements arrive to drive the shadows away, before ‘Visions Of Tokyo’ injects a harder beat-driven edge with its deep, techy percussive rhythms and whining synth-drone dynamics. While this sort of classic early / mid-nineties IDM techno sound is certainly one that’s been extremely well-explored already, in this case it’s the sheer attention to detail and sense of emotional journey generated throughout that makes ‘Nu Age’ an album well worth exploring.
Chris Downton
