Deep house, by definition, puts a premium on emotion, but even by those standards, Roman Flügel is an uncommonly expressive producer. His “How to Spread Lies,” from 2010, remains one of this decade's most effective pairings of melancholy moods and dance-floor kinetics; so is 2010’s “Brian Le Bon,” which borrows a musical phrase from Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” of all things. Even when his more playful instincts take the lead—see, for instance, the tumbling arpeggios and dizzying percussive interplay of “Brasil,” or the blurry electro of “Cookie Dust,” which swerves like a spinning top—there’s a wistful undercurrent that sets him apart from less sensitive producers.
Given the consistency of both his quality control and his emotional register, it can be easy to forget that Flügel is also one of house and techno’s most versatile musicians. In the ’90s, he spread his stylistic interests across a wide array of aliases—Eight Miles High, Soylent Green, Roman IV—along with his duo Alter Ego, with Jörn Elling Wuttke, and its various, well, alter egos (Acid Jesus, Holy Garage, Sensorama, et al). Deep house, acid, Frankfurt trance, and minimal techno have all figured in his playbook; with “Geht’s Noch?” and Alter Ego’s “Rocker,” he even added a bullet point for big, dumb rave anthems to his resume.
His new EP for the Die Orakel label finds him continuing to break new stylistic ground—and working at the far extreme of his more misty-eyed house productions. Verschiebung is inscrutable, austere, and single-minded in its focus. The title is a German word that translates, depending upon the context, as “displacement,” “deferral,” “movement,” “shift,” or “drift,” and the music follows suit. What appear, at first, to be four smooth, muted takes on reductionist techno, with sonar pings skipping across the top of pitter-pat drum patterns, prove, upon closer inspection, to be far thornier constructions. Ostensibly repetitive patterns short circuit again and again, and looped phrases break and scatter into fragments. Yet, unlike someone like Autechre, say, it still preserves the illusion of frictionless forward glide.
The four untitled tracks here are all variations upon a small, tightly controlled set of sounds—scratchy little hi-hats, rimshots, and tuned toms, overlaid with uneven bleeps evoking open car doors, or trucks backing up. There are no melodies, just stuttering patterns of queasily pitch-bent pings; minor keys predominate. It’s all resolutely analog, suggesting the sound of electricity pushing itself through wires—not so much dance music as impedance music. The most important element is the one you don't actually hear: the 16-step sequencer, or possibly sequencers, with which Flügel is controlling all his sounds. These are the machines that give his music is rippling sense of instability: By running patterns of different lengths against each other, and constantly manipulating his loops in real time, he turns out a softly tangled mess of sounds that just begs to be unraveled—yet switches up as soon as you've begun to tease out the specifics.
Where most house and techno rarely let go of the four-to-the-floor handrail, these cuts drift freely atop the steady pulse, with strange time signatures and dub delay stretching the rhythmic grid until it begins to warp. “Verschiebung 1” comes closest to the steady groove of minimal techno, but trying to parse its elements is a nonstarter, and will quickly prove as easy as compiling a grocery list while stoned. On “Verschiebung 2,” triplets hammer against a beat counted off in intervals of seven; on “Verschiebung 3,” glassy pings pile up like colliding rings on the surface of a rain-spattered lake. The drum-free “Verschiebung 4,” the record’s most austere cut, clangs like something hammering on the hull of a submarine. Listeners looking for emotional payoff may be put off by the coldness of these tracks, but you can’t help but marvel at their focus. It’s a comparatively minor work for Flügel, but even marking time to a broken metronome, he stirs a powerful sense of unease.
