Before Burial stepped out of the rain-slicked darkness or Redshape donned his corny red plastic mask, Pom Pom anonymously churned out brute, functionalist techno for their eponymous label, one untitled, unmarked, all-black 12" at a time. Since 2001, long before mystery artists were a fetishized entity and favored marketing strategy in electronic music, Pom Pom have issued 50-plus releases. The facelessness of the operation—along with the outward interchangeability of the releases themselves, without cover art, titles, or even center stickers—has made Pom Pom feel like a metonym for techno itself. The onomatopoeic alias doesn’t hurt.
There was a lull in Pom Pom’s output during the middle of this decade, but things picked up again in 2017. Last year, in their first major outing on a label other than their own, Pom Pom turned up on Berlin’s A-Ton—a fitting place, given that A-Ton’s parent company, the iconic nightclub Berghain, is itself synonymous with techno. The new Untitled II, their return to A-Ton, picks up the general palette of last year’s five-track EP Untitled, in which analog drum machines and unvarnished synths swam in chilly reverb and skin-chapping distortion. Though clearly intended as a companion to the preceding EP (Untitled II’s sequentially numbered tracks begin with “Untitled 6”), these eight tracks are moodier and more diverse. Where Untitled was largely geared toward pummeling, peak-time play, Untitled II skulks around dance music’s edges.
Instead of the digital precision of much contemporary dance music, Pom Pom’s beats lumber and lurch, elephantine and unsteady, ungainly and strange. The clubbiest track here, the only one that feels like a boom-ticking DJ tool, doesn’t last three minutes. The lengthiest cut, “Untitled 10,” is also the most unfocused: seven minutes of drainpipe clank, black-metal drone, and the tentative thud of drums untethered from their timekeeping role. In between those, Pom Pom explore John Carpenter-esque synth arpeggios, electronically generated cricket buzz, and glowering ambient.
For all the wintry sonics, this isn’t a curl-up-on-the-couch listen: “Untitled 9” is a whirling barrage of double-time EBM, a real post-punk nail-biter. The major-key chords and icy melody of “Untitled 11” create a queasy sense of contrast with the somber surroundings. Despite the omnipresent gloom, Untitled II isn’t averse to allowing the occasional manic grin, so that what can look monochromatic reveals an oily iridescence.
As for Pom Pom themselves, their mystery abides. The music offers few fingerprints that might be traced back to other artists. There are scads of people out there making shadowy, post-punk techno with a similar grimness. Untitled II almost deliberately seems to eschew auteurism, though, preferring to fall back on the hallmarks of genre itself—tweaking the proportions of a carefully rounded kick drum, say, or offering teasing throwbacks to the vintage bleep techno of Warp Records’ early years. That’s ultimately the album’s chief pleasure: Like techno at its most visceral, it requires no justification and no explanation. This is dark music for dark rooms and dark moods. While its effects may not linger, when the record’s on the platter, it casts an impressively deep shadow.
