From its cover, DJ Richard's Grind looks like a certain bombed-out species of noise record. It's got a black-and-white color scheme and an elegantly austere design, in the center of which a neatly centered photograph of a bridge rises, bleached and brittle as a wishbone, from a wintry thicket of trees. Those familiar with Rhode Island may recognize the structure as the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge—and what is Rhode Island if not a longstanding hotbed of unorthodox electronics?
But Grind is not a noise record, even though its darkly lustrous synthesizers could probably serve as the foundation for a pretty blistering Prurient track. Like the Rhode Island native’s previous EPs for New York’s White Material label, DJ Richard’s debut album strikes a balance between house and techno: analog in feel, melancholy in mood, and rough around the edges, yet still unmistakably elegant. More than his previous singles, Grind serves as a bridge between European and American styles, perhaps as a result of his relocation to Berlin. Its patient, four-to-the-floor rhythms, consonant tones, and twinkling details are of a piece with German producers (and Dial regulars) like Lawrence and Roman Flügel, and the wistful shimmer of "I-Mir" and "Vampire Dub" echoes Kompakt’s resident sentimentalist, Superpitcher. But his unvarnished drum machines and torn-up textures have more in common with the brawnier approach favored by scrappy domestic crews like L.I.E.S., while his crisply jacking grooves go straight to the Midwestern root.
Far more than a formal exercise, though, the album is as expressive as techno gets, tracing a path from sullen mood pieces to bittersweet melodies to something that feels cathartic. It was recorded after two years spent living in landlocked Berlin, which might explain the vaguely coastal theme that surfaces in titles like "Savage Coast", "Waiting for the Green Flash", and "I-Mir" (the latter two are references to an atmospheric optical illusion occasionally seen at sunset). Above all, Grind comes across as a meditation on homesickness and distance; that’s particularly true of the album’s bleakest tracks, which are rooted in coldwave and dark ambient.
The album opens with a lowing foghorn dirge that brings to mind the bilious drones of Christoph de Babalon’s 1997 album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. It's one of several beatless, atmospheric tracks that help set the album's pensive tone: "Waiting for the Green Flash" sounds like a pitched-down approximation of the beatless closing minutes of Sonic Youth's "Expressway to Yr Skull", all brooding bell tones and trembling harmonics, while the monolithic "Ejected" sounds like a synth player's tribute to microtonal minimalists Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock. At first blush, these tracks might seem static, but turn them up loud enough and zero in on the shifting contours of their frequencies, and they truly come alive.
His beat-oriented work benefits from the same richness and subtlety. "Nighthawk", "Savage Coast", and "Bane", in particular, are examples of how to sculpt and layer relatively simple analog sounds so that they really sing. Richard's taste in synthesizers leans towards soft pads that beg you to sink into them, and he has a knack for contrasting those airy patches with tough, cutting drum hits that leave welts where they land. On "Nighthawk", a stretched and sandpapered wail in the background is both harsh and enveloping—a tactic that goes to the heart of the producer's keen sense of balance. He favors stuttering drum programming that suggests a mechanical kind of funk, and he is skilled at arranging contrapuntal lines into complicated but elegant orbits. Despite the outward simplicity of his productions, there's always something to tip their intensity levels subtly into the red. On "Screes of Gray Craig", it's the slight detuning of three or four separate synthesizer parts, so that they vibrate wildly in combination. And in the closing "Vampire Dub", a relaxing cut suffused in dreamy chords, it's the eerie, atonal bleating that burbles on like cosmic background radiation. Still, even at their most roiled, Grind's waters invite extended immersion. It's both one of the year's most sumptuous techno long-players and a masterful example of an unusual, bare-knuckled strain of ambient music.
