It's hard to describe Redshape's music without resorting to the word "classic." Both his grooves and his synthesizers suggest an almost idealized vision of mid-1990s Detroit techno. But using the c-word still feels like a failure of the imagination. (Depending where you stand on the whole "retro" issue, it also might feel like an insult.) For one thing, it's hard to think of many actual Detroit techno albums that actually sound quite like The Dance Paradox, Redshape's debut album.
Carl Craig's Landcruising and More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art both come to mind, in tone and instrumentation, but they're actually very different: more diverse and probably more ambitious, but also not as focused on a single, binding mood as The Dance Paradox. Urban Tribe's The Collapse of Modern Culture (one of the 90s' finest electronic-music albums, and criminally out of print today) might offer a better precedent for Redshape's anxious, brooding, sentimentally dystopian sounds, but again-- musically speaking, structurally speaking-- Redshape's record has its own agenda.
A bit like Burial, who reworked the signifiers of UK Garage into an extremely personal sound, Redshape takes the essential tropes of techno's most fertile period-- grooves fused from chugging drum machines and quicksilver drum breaks, endless arrays of synthesizers that gleam like the skyline of a dead city-- to create a unique and compelling style, one defined above all by its sensuality.
True to its title, The Dance Paradox refuses to take the concept of "dance music" at face value. Its salient elements-- lithe 909 patterns, roiling bass arpeggios, spine-tingling synth flourishes-- come from the club, but none of its tracks run above 123 BPM, and some sink to 118 or even 108. (For a measure of comparison, contemporary house music typically clocks between 120 and 125 BPM, while classic techno often reached well into the 130s.) But what the music sacrifices in tempo it makes up for in force. Slow and lumbering, it executes its maneuvers like a ship approaching port, unfurling long, interwoven melodic leads whose full arc only becomes clear by track's end.
Despite their pace and their ruminative mood, these aren't chillout tracks; they're meant to be heard loud, the mass of the sound sweeping you up like a rising tide. Both cautious and immediate, deliberate and explosive, the music wonderfully captures the fraught drama of antecedents like Carl Craig or Urban Tribe. Just listen to the slowly churning "Rorschach's Game", which assembles itself as if from ashes, rising from white noise atop a thundering kick drum beneath an opalescent shimmer that wouldn't sound out of place on an Emeralds jam; shakers and skipping hi-hats flesh out its form, clattering like magnets clapped onto a metal exoskeleton. And then, to climax, Redshape unleashes an enormous series of drum fills, almost certainly played by a human drummer on a real drum kit, and the whole thing comes tumbling down, as though the rug beneath had been pulled free.
"Man Out of Time" follows a similar trajectory, laying out layers of plangent string patches over a heart-in-mouth breakbeat. (A sort of industrial take on downtempo, it sounds like an armored-up version of Mo' Wax's 1996 Excursions compilation.) The lush "Bound (Part 1 & 2)", the album's most overtly techno track, rides dissonant mid-range arpeggios and a hard, overtone-rich bass throb, stoking a sense of unremitting tension; its melodic, ambient outro suggests how Redshape is looking beyond the dancefloor and the 12", helping give The Dance Paradox a sense of flow that's uncommon for techno longplayers created in the 2000s.
Redshape's synthesizers deserve special mention. The artist, who remains nominally anonymous (five minutes of internet sleuthing will lead you to an unmasking about as anticlimactic as Burial's), has claimed to favor analog gear, and it sounds like it-- although the way that software synths are evolving, it's getting harder and harder to tell. In any case, the specific tools matter less than what the artist achieves with them. Here, it's an array of sounds by turns metallic, velvety, porous, and pulverous. Emphasizing timbre and texture over melody and harmony, they're in constant motion-- sweeping, swelling, crumbling. They suggest Philly International's string ostinatos, frozen and then bronzed and crusted with oxidation; they billow out like dust-clouds around the base of a demolished high-rise. At the risk of tripping over techno's postmodern pathetic fallacy, Redshape's music, like that of his Detroit inspirations, almost invariably evokes visions of a kind of tarnished futurism. It throws up gleaming, industrial age surfaces and then revels in their decay.
