If you bought Porter Ricks' Biokinetics on CD in the 1990s and the disc is still intact, consider yourself lucky: The original edition is currently trading for $65 and up on Discogs. The price has something to do with the album's place in history: Biokinetics, a touchstone of experimental techno, was the first album released on Berlin's widely worshipped Chain Reaction label. But scarcity is a bigger factor: Biokinetics, like all of Chain Reaction's CDs from that era, came packaged in an aluminum tin that tended to crack the CD it was supposed to be protecting. (As a comment on Discogs notes, "Another Chain Reaction release, another metal box that eats up CDs.")
Fortunately, 16 years later, John Twells' Massachusetts-based Type label has stepped up with a reissue of the landmark album, not just on CD (this time in a standard jewel case) but also, for the first time, on 2xLP and digital download. It's a welcome reissue, and long overdue. It comes as certain ideas from techno's fertile, experimental, mid-1990s period are being picked up by a range of underground musicians. Many of these ideas have permeated so deeply into the culture that it's hard to remember a time without them, but we wouldn't have Burial, to name just one of the duo's distant descendants, without Porter Ricks' seafloor crackle and mottled-granite color scale.
Porter Ricks were the duo of Thomas Köner, a sound artist and ambient composer, and Andy Mellwig, a techno producer who also recorded as Continuous Mode and, with former Monolake member and future Ableton founder Gerhard Behles, as Async Sense. Released in 1996, Biokinetics was Porter Ricks' debut album, gathering tracks from three vinyl EPs released that year along with three songs exclusive to the album. It had been years since I last listened to it, and the Type reissue surprised me first by reminding me how diverse the album is. "Chain Reaction" has long since become shorthand for a certain fusion of buoyant dub, hazy ambience, and coiled techno, but on Biokinetics, none of these has quite settled into place; it's a dynamic, unpredictable mixture of pulse and hiss.
The opening "Port Gentil", a precursor to the template Wolfgang Voigt would adopt under his Gas alias, pairs soft, monochromatic tones with a muted 4/4 pulse. On the surface, it couldn't be simpler, but as it pulls you in, you become aware of shifting contours and unusual dimensions, the interplay of light and shadow; it sounds like a string section tuning up atop a freight train trundling through a deep canyon.
"Nautical Dub" hews closer to textbook techno, with muscular bass pushing relentlessly forward, but it's hardly conventional. There are no sharp edges, for one thing: Percussive accents have been buffed to a dull gleam, and the upper register of the track, normally reserved for crisp, cutting hi-hats, is diffused into a fine-gauge spray that sweeps back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. Only "Port of Call" assumes dancefloor techno's chiseled boom-tick profile, but this time it's the low end that's fizzed to near nothingness. A few years later, Pole would famously construct an entire aesthetic around the vagaries of a broken Waldorf filter, but Biokinetics was first: Everything sounds broken here, all frayed cables and dusty contacts, and every gesture toward techno clarity feels like a trade-off made at the expense of another element that's left to crumble.
Dub techno has since become one of electronic music's most mannered styles, but here, Porter Ricks' tracks feel not so much like compositions, much less stylistic exercises, than answers to very specific, fairly arcane questions-- what happens when we route this LFO through that filter? How many divisions can we parse between the downbeats? How can chaos be turned into rhythm, and how far can a repetition be stretched before it's rendered senseless? Where is the boundary between tone and white noise?
On "Biokinetics 1", a heaving, wheezing synthesizer struggles to stick to a regular pulse as it's fed through disorienting delay and looped back upon itself, stumbling and confused. As an experiment in stretching a groove to the breaking point, it's as exhilarating as anything in the history of techno. "Port of Nuba" and "Nautical Nuba" submit drum machines to a similar warping process, resulting in rhythms that gallop like teams of horses. Here, you can hear the origin of Thomas Brinkmann's tumbling cadences of a year or two later, as he used a double-armed turntable to draw elliptical rhythms out of the grooves of records by Wolfgang Voigt and Richie Hawtin. And while we're talking about precedents, the leaden dirge of "Biokinetics 2" lays the groundwork for the bleak, trudging techno of Andy Stott and his Modern Love labelmates.
That Biokinetics is an album about currents is reflected in its seafaring titles, such as "Nautical Dub", "Nautical Zone", "Port of Call", etc., and also in the way that the record's energies feed back into itself. What Porter Ricks learned from dub was less about particular rhythms or stylistic tropes than about the path that a sound travels as it wends its way through the mixing desk, and how it comes out transformed on the other side. Dub's hall-of-mirrors approach to versioning, meanwhile, informs the way that many tracks here are variations upon one another: "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" bookend the album with nearly identical chords, while "Nautical Nuba" and "Port of Nuba" recycle the same drum patterns, using filters and delays to achieve very different results. Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.
Like Detroit's Drexciya, Porter Ricks (who took their name from a character from Flipper, the 1960s film and television series) used aquatic metaphors to get at larger ideas, both musical and otherwise. Ocean currents, electrical currents, sound waves, feedback; dub, techno, minimalism, noise; exchange as a fluid back-and-forth but also, as Drexciya pointed out, as a loaded dynamic, fraught, unequal-- they all swirl together, rippling in time and veering out of sync, as though pulled by complicated gravitational forces. Biokinetics is above all a music of tides, suggesting rhythm as both celestial stroke and as a vibration deep in the body, bubbling at the molecular level.
