Barker & Baumecker

Transsektoral Barker & Baumecker

Techno comes in all shapes and sizes, and few recent outfits embody that truth more obviously than Berlin's Barker & Baumecker. One operates as Barker/Voltek and the other as nd_baumecker. Both solo projects exhibit unconventional takes on Techno inflected by the influence of other genres, from Glitch to Dubstep to Ambient and beyond. Judging from their output so far on Ostgut Ton, one gets the idea that these fellows know a lot about electronic music; their label debut “Candyflip” was a 9-minute opus spelled out in broken beats and trancelike tones, the kind of track that seems to reference a million different things in one coherent, confident statement. It should come as no surprise, then, that their debut album together is a many-sided prism reflecting different iterations of Techno from all angles. Titled “Transsektoral”, the album name refers to the duo's ambition to travel across the entire spectrum of electronic music. That's what they do on the LP, bridging a seemingly impossible gap between the dubby blobs of ambient opener “Sektor” to the effervescent bubbling of the epic closer “Spur,” like happy hardcore unravelled and disassembled into a soothing afterword worthy of someone like Dntel. What happens in between is nothing short of alchemy, or some other lost art, traversing all sorts of terrain without ever losing the plot. It's held together in part by the duo's keen grasp of sound design—they always work together in person, on an expansive set of hardware—so no matter what tunnel they're travelling down head-first, the sounds are always pristine, filled with unexpected details like hi- hats shoved into corners where you'd never expect them to fit. These are machinistic creations that swell with organic respiration and lush life, despite their artificial origins. The album jumps from garage-leaning bouncy house with “No Body” to exuberant tonnes-heavy off- kilter house (“Buttcracker”) where bubbles of caustic acid send the track into overdrive—yet non