Cosmin Nicolae committed what for many young electronic producers is a cardinal sin: He changed. Quite a bit, actually: his name (from TRG to Cosmin TRG), his home base (from Romania to Berlin), his label(s), and most notably, his sound. Since 2007, his run of singles for A-list labels like Hessle Audio, Hotflush, Tempa, and Rush Hour has made it impossible to pin him to a specific scene or style. This isn't a sin in and of itself, but amidst the shifting sands of electronic music, it's helpful to have reference points: "Aphex Twin makes IDM" is easy to remember, and even if it's only partly true, it's simpler to sort the details out later. Cosmin's constant shapeshifting has made it difficult to identify him with a scene or sound, and his career has seemed diffuse as a result.
The first time I heard Nicolae's debut full-length, Simulat, I gave myself a signpost: dubstep. Nicolae's label history warranted the nonchalant tagging, and, moreover, the album's thickly dug bass grooves were what stuck with me. Nicolae, perpetually in motion, is exactly the type of artist who makes these quick-hit bindings unwise. Simulat certainly borrows the rich, tonal bass of dubstep-- as well as its tendency to drift off when not explicitly pushing forward-- but its grooves are more straightforward, shuffling instead of circling, the work of an artist who has internalized the narratives of modern dance without bending to them. Nicolae instead looks to the recent history of Berlin techno-- Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock-- and further back to Detroit-- Robert Hood and especially Richie Hawtin-- for Simulat's roadmap.
What this means: linear grooves, prickly synth arpeggios, and sweeping strings/organs or fake-strings/fake-organs. Never a producer of marathon tracks, Nicolae is smart to keep his compositions in the manageable 4-to-5-minute range: Simulat clocks in at a lean, replayable 47 minutes. He stitches it together with moments of meditation and calm, his keyboards seeping through the floorboards to inhabit ghostlier environs and tempos. I like tracks like "Want You to Be" and "Form Over Function" most: They offer easy-to-tap rhythms and mallet-simple keyboard thwacks, manageable menace that makes me want to bob and weave in my headphones instead of sinking into them. The album's lead single "Fizic" gallops along on the type of UFO-on-cruise-control futurism Juan Atkins pioneered.
Nicolae's tracks don't evolve, so much; they arrive, mature quickly, and exit. Simulat is an album concerned with suggested mood instead of sustained groove, but it uses the building blocks of rhythm-- four-on-the-floor drum kicks, bass pulses-- to construct those moods. At his best Nicolae offers the dystopic vistas of techno with an off-center hint of warmth: I've never really wanted to dance to a Plastikman track, but I find it hard to sit still during "Ritmat"'s tricky home-appliance palpitations. This distinguishes Simulat from a legion of too-serious Berlin techno stalwarts and renders snap judgments about Nicolae's present-- or future-- silly.
