With a career that’s almost passed the two-decade mark, John Tejada is one of the techno scene’s most consistent producers. After years of releasing solid club singles on his own label Palette, Tejada made the jump to Kompakt in 2011. The collaboration spoke to his influence as a dependable underground producer and it led to the excellent Parabolas, an album that revealed a deliberate shift in his aesthetic; instead of crunchy, textural techno, Parabolas was sweeping, fleshing out the lush harmonics and studied melodicism he’d hinted at in earlier work. Since then, he's settled into a comfortable spot in the ageless haven of the Kompakt roster, honing his skills in the realm of album-as-art form. His latest release for Kompakt, Signs Under Test, continues to explore the underlying principles of Parabolas and its follow-up, The Predicting Machine, and may be his most cohesive effort yet.
Listening to Signs Under Test triggers a sweet ache rather than a foot-stomping energy blast. It’s full of bubbling synth noise, warbly acid stabs, and bell-like reverberations, to the point that it’s sometimes opaque. But on repeated listens, that murkiness comes to sound like carefully rendered songcraft, designed to reveal its precision on repeated listens. On "Beacht", a pealing melody undergoes a series of manipulations that are strung together so seamlessly, it’s easy to hear it as one long, looping phrase. Many of Tejada’s other compositions are rich in detail that makes their appeal hard to pinpoint: "Endorphins" winds up from harmonious acid squiggles to a suspended mechanical buzz that, left without its repetitive chord structure, renders the song momentarily weightless.
One of Tejada’s greatest strengths lies in a driving melodies that sounds anachronistic in relation to today’s dark, percussion-driven club techno and the frenzied glare of radio EDM. This puts him in a natural dialogue with mid-2000s Kompakt luminaries like Michael Mayer, Thomas Fehlmann, and Axel Willner of the Field. On "Vaalbara", one of the album’s emotional high points, a gorgeously wilted tune fragment elevates a dramatic cloud of piecemeal flourishes into a song that, halfway tuned to pop sensibilities and halfway to dank, fog-machine club atmospherics, rivals Nottingham’s rave revisionist Lone for pure melodic resourcefulness. While most of the dance world continues to view the creation of a solid album discography as strictly optional, Signs Under Test is a strong entry that proves Tejada's quietly building up a legacy of excellence.
