Once the slipperiest of entities, Berlin's Basic Channel long ago hardened into one of electronic music's most enduring touchstones. In 1993 and 1994, when every few months brought a new 12-inch single from the label-- featuring minimal information, cryptic lettering, and the strangest, most insidiously corkscrewing grooves every to come out of a tangle of boxes and wires-- no one quite knew what to make of them. Who was Cyrus, the label's first artist? Were these Detroiters in disguise? What exactly was Basic Channel, anyway, given that the name was shared between the label and the artist responsible for most of its releases? By 1995, when the compilation BCD-- their CD debut-- collected selections from those singles, little had been cleared up, but the self-destructing cardboard sleeve-- and the sticker on the back commanding, "buy vinyl!"-- suggested that whoever they were, they were serious about creating not just a different kind of music, but a new kind of musical entity. Much like Detroit's Underground Resistance, Basic Channel were injecting DIY electronic dance music with a degree of mythmaking that would become as central to techno as its 4/4 pulse.
A lot can change in a decade and a half. When The Wire's Biba Kopf interviewed the two guys behind Basic Channel in '96, they agreed only to give their first names. Now, of course, Basic Channel are widely known as Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, the figureheads of an empire that includes not only Basic Channel but also numerous offshoot projects, including the more ambient-leaning Chain Reaction, the house-oriented Main Street, the rootsier Rhythm & Sound. More than just a collection of labels or a community of artists, Basic Channel is a vertically integrated organization encompassing the vinyl mastering facility Dubplates and Mastering and the legendary record shop and distributor Hard Wax.
While their organizational structure inevitably helped fuel much of the myth behind Basic Channel-- and, in the process, created a model that would be followed by organizations like Kompakt-- music was source of their power. Plainly put, Basic Channel invented dub techno, though that two-word tag isn't really adequate to describe the unity of their sound, their entirely holistic vision. Their influence hangs over hundreds or even thousands of artists and labels; without Basic Channel, its difficult to imagine minimal techno, or "minimal," existing as we know it. Most striking of all, though, is the fact that Basic Channel are widely acknowledged not only to have invented, but perfected, the genre; even some of their most talented followers will readily admit to being only imitators.
Following 13 years after BCD, BCD-2 is only Basic Channel's second CD release, and again, it revisits previously released work. The tracks included-- taken from catalog numbers BC-01, 02, 05, 07 and 09-- are 14 and 15 years old now, but their reissue couldn't be more timely. Dub techno's currency is at its highest point in a decade. Contemporary artists like DeepChord, Echospace, and MLZ pump out vaporous grooves faithful to Basic Channel's template, while producers like Martyn and 2562 apply Basic Channel's tonalities to dubstep's rhythmic framework. And Pole, a member of dub techno's second generation, has just reissued his album trilogy from the turn of the decade, in which he further mutated Basic Channel's hissing pulse.
BCD-2 may surprise listeners who thought they knew the Basic Channel sound, however. Most of their notoriety is due to the music showcased on the original BCD, awash in steely, aquatic color and blown this way and that by colliding waves of delay, sometimes driven by a muted 4/4 kick but just as often propelled by a broad, feathery pulse with no distinct center. (These fizzy, fuzzy, watercolor studies in the sublime remained the focus of the Chain Reaction label, helping to further cement their reputation as listing towards bliss.)
But while Ernestus and Von Oswald infused the delicate with surprising, sinewy heft, they could also be straight-up muscular, and it's in this far more techno territory that BCD-2 spends most of its energy. To begin with, the tracks are often faster: "Enforcement", from the first single, is roughly 150 bpm (noticebly faster than the 128 bpm pace reigning today), and the rest of the album hovers in the 140s, with the exception of the closing "Phylyps Trak II/II". (At around 128, it's not coincidental that the archetypal "Phylyps Trak II/II" sounds the closest of anything here to contemporary minimal house and techno.)
But it's not just a question of tempo: the tracks here are fiercer and far more raw than anything on BCD. On "Enforcement", jagged acid arpeggios cut through the middle frequencies like a band saw. It feels strangely flat, as though an enormous range had been compressed into two dimensions-- the opposite of the expansive spatial tactics for which Basic Channel are best known. "Phylyps Trak", while graced with billowing chords and more liquid depths, is overrun with a nagging open hi-hat, insistent and unmodulating, propelled with a singlemindedness that verges on the disturbing. Both tracks are absolutely minimalist in spirit, limiting themselves to a slim handful of elements-- all rigorously tonal, but never melodic-- and letting filters and delay create the illusion of movement. But they're far more banging than virtually anything flying under the banner of "minimal" today, reminders of early 90s Berlin where a kind of frenzied frontier spirit ruled, in place of today's more complacent nightclub lifestyle.
"Inversion", like "Enforcement" and "Phylyps Trak", is in many ways a study in genre: A 909 drum machine, spiraling acid bass, and glancing, syncopated chords render Detroit techno as a kind of ideal type before turning to dub as a mediating influence, using reverb and delay to smear it all into something hazy and indistinct. It's here that Basic Channel's taste for the amorphous really begins to show itself on BCD-2, along with their ambitions of scale: "Inversion", essentially a single groove stretched in a thousand directions, runs to nearly 18 minutes long. (Four of the cuts here are 13 minutes long; "Phylyps Trak", the album's shortest selection, is 10. There was no mistaking this for pop music.)
"Octagon" and "Octaedre", both sides of BC-07, continue to nudge the CD into the Basic Channel sweet spot. Everything you need to know about techno is here-- the kick drum, the flayed hi-hats, the stabbing chords-- but they're treated in such a way that they lose their identity; stripped of character, they cede to the art of repetition, the real star of the show. Every track is a repetition of the others, and every repetition grinds on into infinity. Even at 13 or 17 minutes long, they feel like snippets clipped from a continuum-- particularly the closing "Phylyps Trak II/II", the dubbiest and most hypnotic of the collection's pieces.
It will be interesting to see how BCD-2 appeals to fans of the label who remain otherwise unconvinced about techno; the CD presents a far more complicated relationship between genre and genius than does BCD or, indeed, Basic Channel's reputation itself. (It's tough not to verge upon hagiography when writing about Basic Channel; such is the power of the myth surrounding them.) But whatever the case, BCD-2 is an essential and long-overdue overview of one of the most important projects in all of techno, usefully muddying the waters around a group that made "muddy" one of their signature tropes. It all begins here.
