Before he was Skee Mask, Bryan Müller was SCNTST. Monday, the Munich producer’s debut EP, is straightforward and delirious, full of tightly wound grooves and head-spinning change-ups; it rockets between electro, ghettotech, juke, and techno, each track containing as many ideas as it does drum patterns. With that EP, Müller was looking less toward science than alchemy—an approach that proved indicative. As Skee Mask, Müller has spent the past decade combining dance-music histories in all sorts of beguiling ways: dubbed-out hardgroove techno, fleet-footed drum ’n’ bass and bone-chilling ambience, psychedelic and minimalistic IDM. Resort, the electronic producer’s latest LP, may be his most potent distillation yet. Here, he makes his club-ready approach to historiography clear, crumpling up timelines and sketching out a universe.
While particular details change from record to record, Müller’s tunes often harbor a similar feeling: It is heart-on-sleeve and tough at once, every drum landing with an icy precision and each keyboard stretching towards the skies. Even as he pans from one genre to another, that emotive approach serves as his bedrock. His music sits at the intersections of breakbeats, ambient music, and techno; over the years, he’s become so adept behind the boards that any seams are more or less invisible. His catalog is equally suited for basement raves, 4 a.m. highways, and sun-drenched afternoons—pitch the bass accordingly and you’re good to go. Resort takes full advantage of this range, playing like a guided tour of Müller’s catalog, each kick drum landing with the quiet intimacy of a familiar heartbeat.
Part of the thrill of Resort is in watching Müller stretch out a bit, exploring new territories by revisiting old traditions. In doing so, he offers up some of his warmest and most inviting music to date, giving his always-precise drum programming a sepia-tinged hue. In its best moments, the LP sounds beamed in from a slightly different universe, one in which Warp and Rephlex never left the mid-’90s and every sample arrived blanketed in a thin layer of dust. “BB Care,” thanks to its ramshackle drums, dreamy synth pads, and barely there vocal samples, feels like a forgotten bonus track from Music Has the Right to Children. “Hölzl Was a Dancer,” a house-music stomper with shuffle-and-skip drums and an acrobatic bassline, might have lit up dancefloors in 1992. The hazy synth workout “Hedwig Transformation Group” recalls GAS at his most blissed-out, while “Waldmeister” displays Müller’s ambient-techno chops, with sun-dappled synthesizers gleaming amid groaning bass.
For all its retro-leaning references, Resort is hardly shackled to the past. It is a series of clever and subtle reimaginings, fusing new-school and genre-agnostic approaches to electronic music with vintage textures. (A few track titles—“Nostaglitch,” “Reminiscrmx”—cheekily underline this idea.) Squint and you’ll notice shards of juke and footwork underneath the lullaby-soft synthesizers of “Daytime Gamer,” and “Element,” which sits somewhere between acid, breaks, and ambient music, sounds like something that might play as sun fills the Nowadays dancefloor. Skee Mask has never been an aesthetic purist, exactly—that first SCNTST EP twisted DJ Assault’s speaker-busting “Ass N Titties” into a psychedelic sort-of-techno brain-bender—but he clearly understands the power of tweaking familiar idioms. Resort, with its blissed-out breakbeats, lucid-dream techno, and gauzy downtempo, is both a quiet flex and an ode to umpteen dance-music histories.
