Since its inception, Munich's Prologue label and its stable of artists have been associated with a brand of techno focused on deep wells of subterranean rumbling and liquid synth washes, an ambient, texture-oriented sound once dubbed "headfuck techno" and that has become ubiquitous. Prologue has a secret weapon in Donato Dozzy, whose own productions could range from relatively chugging techno ("Menta"), pastoral daydreams (his remix of Tin Man's "Nonneo"), and any manner of ambient synth kosmische material. His Voices From the Lake project is a collaboration with fellow Italian Neel, and solves Prologue's predictability problem by reinventing typical techno structures wholesale.
Voices From the Lake emerged in 2010 as the name for a semi-anonymous Neel mix, proffering up more than an hour of elegantly paced ambient techno. The moniker appeared on Prologue last year with a four-track EP of spiritually throbbing techno. Their self-titled album is the fruit of a live set worked up by the duo played at Japan's infamous Labyrinth, the mountain-set festival with which Dozzy has long been associated, and removes most of the conventional techno signifiers of both contributors' past work in favor of a webbed crawl that takes trance's steady chug and applies it to a new-agey palette of discrete, delicate textures.
Kick drum? What's that? The first thing you'll notice about Voices From the Lake is that it seems to be made out of meticulously detailed glass shards, a brittle and dissolute sort of rhythm that forms out of synchronous elliptical patterns rather than the rigid time signatures of techno. There's a pulse there, but it's soft and hidden, like you'd have to peel back a thousand layers to get closer to these songs' beating heart. The result is something that sounds strangely alive and heavily dynamic, where patterns shift and forms morph so subtly and patiently that it's hard to tell exactly what's going on at any moment, like a fractal that actually changes shape as you go further down to its core. This gives the album an unusual flow that feels like stationary floating in space, 70 minutes of beautifully constructed breathing music so painstaking you can't tell where one track begins and another ends if you aren't watching your music player: It just is.
That's not to say Voices From the Lake doesn't change over its running time, because dip your fingers into the world music vortex of "Vega" and then look to the submerged rave of "Twins in Virgo", and you'll find yourself in two very different wading pools of bubbling beats. There is one defining moment on Voices that stands out above all others, the pair's rework of the previously-released Dozzy track "S.T.". After almost 30 minutes of percolation and vibration, a single bassline emerges, a gently ascending and descending chord progression that harbors an unusual impact for something that sounds so airy and ephemeral. Those particulate low frequencies flood the canvas of a work painted mostly in dot matrix with broad strokes of emotion.
In terms of taking "techno" to unconventional extremes of sound design and structure, Voices From the Lake most immediately recalls Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's exhaustive Re: ECM double album from last year, but Voices has more emotional resonance and a rhythmic plot that feels more inviting, even if it's no less difficult to figure out. But barring that mid-album explosion of melody, this is a record that eschews the politics of techno linearity, replacing the rise-rise-rise-rise-peak-blowout-descend progression with one that puts all the tension and shift into pockets and sounds so small that it sounds more like a vibrant ecosystem of microorganisms than "beats."
Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity. Rarely can an album be this intimidatingly detailed, warmly inviting, and totally indifferent. In its seeming quest to map out rhythm to an unimaginable infinity, Voices From the Lake manages to be everything at once: It's some of the most inventive techno in ages, it's some of the prettiest ambient you'll hear on any German techno label, and it's a unique kind of entrancing that would feel hokey if it weren't so undeniably attractive.
