Erik Wiegand, aka Errorsmith, might be one of the most technically adept people working in dance music right now. Case in point: the synthesizer that gives his latest album, Superlative Fatigue, its bazillion-megawatt buzz—part ice-cream headache and part fork in socket. It’s called Razor. It’s a digital synth, a plug-in, marketed by Berlin’s Native Instruments. He built that thing. Invented it, specced it out, programmed it, perfected it. It’s his, and you can buy it—320 sine waves’ worth of additive synthesis, all for $99. That’s some brainiac shit right there. Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert called it “the most innovative software synthesizer I’ve seen in ages.”
Yet Superlative Fatigue, as much as the title might sound like the quintessential cri de cœur of the sleep-deprived coder, is not a nerdy record. No chin-scratching IDM here, no dryly academic number-crunching. No, quite the opposite. It’s fun. Wildly, zanily fun. Some of the most fun you will hear on a techno record this year, certainly on one coming from Berlin. And at a time when underground techno is gloomier than ever before—smeared in charcoal dust, suffused in a post-industrial haze, bled dry of every last iota of color or joy—Errorsmith’s album, in its manic pleasure, is more than just a vivid demonstration of its creator’s technical abilities: It’s a way out of techno’s self-serious cul-de-sac, a shot of energy just when the genre needs it most.
I’m using the term “techno” loosely; there are few four-to-the-floor kick drums on Superlative Fatigue, fewer still oontz-oontz pulses. The eight-track, 41-minute album is fueled largely by dancehall: On tracks both fast and slow, it’s a loping dembow cadence that drives the rhythm. But Wiegand has deep roots in Berlin’s techno scene. Back in the mid 1990s, his duo MMM was turning out some of the most unrelenting and inventive rave bangers ever to shake the rafters of an abandoned warehouse. By the early 2000s, in the duo Smith N Hack, he was flipping Bohannon edits into overdriven floor-fillers. And his third solo album, 2004’s Near Disco Dawn – Live Recordings 2001-2003, pushed techno’s brute-force fantasies to almost comic extremes: In its furnace-blast white noise and pogo-stick bounce, it imagined techno as the midway point between noise music and “Looney Tunes.”
His tools have changed—Superlative Fatigue, his first solo album in 13 years, and his first solo project since bringing Razor to market, was completed almost entirely using Razor, except for two songs that also feature Roland’s TR-808 drum machine—but the hallmarks of his earlier productions are still there. His signature boils down to a single idea: slippage. On fast tracks, syncopated drums bounce like rocks on an incline, racing the beat and catching air with every rebound; on slow ones, they stumble, fidgety and confused. “Internet of Screws,” a woozy take on trap, replaces the genre’s digital precision with stumbling offbeats, and it turns trap’s typically diamond-tipped snares flaccid and loosey-goosey.
It’s not just the rhythms that seem to have come untethered from the grid: His melodies swoop and dive, unsteady as the prow of a small boat on the high seas. If it turned out that Wiegand had also built a slide-whistle MIDI interface to control Razor, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. In “Who-is,” pipsqueak synth leads and elephantine bass drum rise and fall in dizzily synchronized movements, like flea-circus performers with a serious drug problem. In “I’m Interesting, Cheerful & Sociable,” a wobbly melody splits into multi-part harmonies that stack up in halogen-bright arrays, while the laser zaps of “Centroid” take SOPHIE’s rubbery sound design to even more elastic extremes.
It can be pretty full-on stuff, but his keen sense of control counts for a lot; as antic as it gets, it never entirely goes off the rails. It helps that the album’s back half is largely devoted to slower interpretations of the same ideas. “Retired Low-Level Internal Server” is a blippy dancehall tune reminiscent of the brittle style, showcased on Mo Wax’s Now Thing compilation, that producers like Lenky and Ward 21 were developing around the turn of the millennium; the aforementioned “Internet of Screws” stretches Errorsmith’s tactics almost to the breaking point with a rhythm so scattershot that it can sound deliberately errant. These tracks make the most of their negative space, cushioning all that garish, gloriously artificial sound-sculpting in a welcome layer of emptiness.
The closing track, “My Party,” offers an even more refreshing breath of air. Picking up on the eerie vocal processing of the opening “Lightspeed”—essentially a series of monosyllabic hiccups that sounds like a baritone singer running through his vowels—“My Party” strips everything back to just vocoder and handclaps. Scat-like vocal runs bob up and down the scale like a drunken bumblebee, relishing the buzzy nuance the synth lends to the voice; a sing-song refrain (either “Party my party” or “Body my body,” though it’s hard to say for sure) threatens to dissolve into pure gibberish. It sounds a little like Bobby McFerrin if he had swallowed a kazoo and gotten a case of the giggles, which is to say that it sounds totally ridiculous and totally wonderful. The techno scene can keep its dour, atonal merchants of doom; this interesting, cheerful, sociable, and downright giddy album is the real life of the party.
