Bass music auteurs with wide-ranging interests have become more common in recent years, with up-and-comers routinely crossing over to deep house, tech house, classic techno or spaces in between. It's at the point where every DJ set and label sampler is like a bench stocked deep with utility players. Cosmin TRG (nee Cosmin Nicolae) is one rangy infielder among many, and it might be worth wondering how many of the converts he won over with his early-career dubstep sides or his 2010 breakthrough future garage single “See Other People/Groove Control” stuck around with him when his style-hopping moved further afield.
If they held on through 2011's Simulat, a spare but spaced-out journey into tech house, they might be in for a letdown. With Gordian, Nicolae's gone from evolution to refinement, a paring down that feels like it's wringing every last idea out of the musical concepts he set into motion on his previous album. But what we get here is something more like dilution-- sacrificing its predecessor's stargazing character for the sake of being a sort of ambiguous, fill-in-the-picture take on techno. Granted, that's at least part of what Nicolae intended for Gordian. He's claimed that it's a low-key concept record about mythology, the differentiation between the genuine and the manufactured, perception versus truth, and all that existential good stuff. You'll have to trust him on that-- The titles hint at grand ideas (“New Structures for Loving”; “Desire is Sovereign”; “To Touch Is To Divert”) which evoke more than the attached songs actually do.
As four-on-the-floor pulses go, they're hard to deny, and it's satisfying enough that the man knows how to make a kick drum sound pop your earbuds out. The title track's the best example of how he can build a lot with a little, kicks doubling as a de facto bassline that alternates between letting the beat ride and making it bubble. Giving in to the texture of the drum sounds on the whole is where most of the appeal comes from-- snares and hats distorted into reverberations that pull apart their structure and send flaked-off shards floating up into the air. And if you want a straightforward thump-thump-thump to work its way into your spine, there's some immediate pleasure here, especially when it gets into chord-driven buildups and breakdowns like the bell-shattering “Vertigo” or the heat glow of “Desire Is Sovereign”.
But the emotional appeals, individualistic quirks and unexpected shifts that mark Nicolae's best work is unsettlingly scarce here. In a discography that's regularly brought more to the table than just a good groove, Gordian has an intermittent blankness about it that only occasionally recalls the warm retrofuturism of Simulat, even as it gingerly tries to retrace a lot of that album's steps. It can be attention-getting when a bassline drops out or a new melodic refrain works its way into the track, and there's a fine sense of timing to most of the songs. But it's not often that it registers as anything more than a new patch being cued up, especially in an inexpressive middle stretch that runs through the factory-floor churn of “Semipresent” or the drippy, burbling deadpan minimalism of “Noise Code”. Gordian is never boring, and none of the songs drag on past the point of entropy. That every listener might bring their own meaning to each song is an provocative approach on Nicolae's part-- but it'd be better if the songs made their own purpose just as clear.
