It's surprising that John Tejada hasn't hooked up with Kompakt before. The twitchy grooves of Parabolas, the L.A. transplant's debut LP for the Cologne, Germany-based label, fit right into founder Wolfgang Voigt's minimal techno aesthetic. What binds Tejada's eclectic decade-plus of work is an approach where it seems like every instrumental tweak and glitch has been studiously labored over for great stretches of time. Parabolas feels that way, too. It's a collection of 12 tech-house instrumentals, pitched somewhere between the visceral punch of classic Detroit techno and the headphone-oriented approach of 1990s electronica like Black Dog Production's Bytes and Autechre's Incunabula.
That's some daunting company to keep, but Tejada has the skills to transform his pilfering into something greater than the sum of its influences. Opener "Farther and Fainter" is a case in point. The opening bars initially sound like they're pushing into the kind of densely packed prettiness Aphex Twin was obsessing over on Selected Ambient Works 85–92. But then the deadened bass drum beat kicks in, joined by a series of bell-like samples, and the song stretches to a close via low-end synth noise wrapped around a fading hi-hat. Blanketed in a pensive quality that most bedroom techno shares, the track is a good indication of what to expect from much of Parabolas, which essentially acts like a form of comedown comfort food.
Occasionally Tejada strays close to a full-on ambient sound ("The Dream", "The Honest Man"), but for the most part Parobalas is deliberately stunted at birth. Tracks like "Subdivided" juxtapose zesty synth rolls with stabs of murky bass and rarely deviate from that path. Occasionally the trance-like state Tejada favors can be a little monotonous, but he usually works in unexpected twists just before the music settles into a rut. For example, a few corkscrewing samples light up "Timeless Space", while "The Living Night" tempers its house-y piano stabs by heading somewhere far darker and then frittering into ambience.
The doomy tone that briefly surfaces in "The Living Night" recurs across much of Parabolas' later tracks, neatly contrasting with the airy material that opened the album. On "Unstable Condition", Tejada even heads close to the kind of relentless downer vibe LFO toyed with on "Tied Up" albeit with all the dissonance scraped away to fit with this record's late-night mood. The convergence of light and dark helps make Parobalas work well as a self-contained piece, while the album's sense of focus elevates it above some of Tejada's typical lurches in style.
