Bloodline is a record whose roots run deep. Steven Julien’s follow up to his 2016 debut album, Fallen, is named for the influence the London producer’s family has had on his music. But Bloodline resonates even more profoundly as a callback to Julien’s musical heritage, with each track featuring a piece of Roland equipment—most notably the iconic TR-808 drum machine—in honor of Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who died in April 2017.
Julien may be the ideal musician to pay tribute to Kakehashi. Julien’s productions, while inventive in execution, are relatively simple in sound, using a basic palette that would have been familiar to the Detroit techno innovators of the 1980s who did so much to enhance the reputation of Roland’s TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303 machines. Bloodline takes this minimal approach even further than the nearly skeletal Fallen: The new album’s title track is built on 808 drums and a daub of spectral melody from a Roland Juno synth, while opener “Hunt” uses little more than shifting synth drones, the ominous clanging of a bell, and a noise that resembles the nervous rustle of a thousand wind chimes in a desecrated church.
What makes an impression here are not so much the individual sounds—there are few of those jaw-dropping set pieces that you get in the work of Arca or Katie Gately—but what Julien does with them. This is where the bloodline of the title comes in: Julien recently claimed that his drum programming “ain’t coming from just me, it comes from a long line of ancestors” that includes “rhythm from tribes in Africa and natives from the Caribbean.”
It would take a musicologist to comprehensively trace this evolution, but there is something unique about the way Julien programs a drum machine. On “Roll of the Dice,” his 808 sounds like it’s on the verge of a funk-strained nervous breakdown, its rhythms punctuated by brutal bass drum rolls that seem to want to punch their way out of the 808’s casing. The beat breathes new life into the acidic squiggles of the TB-303, one of the most overworked instruments in techno, constructing a ramshackle acid house that patrons might fear to enter. “Queen of Ungilsan” pushes the electro snap of the 808 in weirdly syncopated directions, with drum hits darting into the mix with the precision of a production-line robot playing jazz.
The liberated feel of Julien’s drum programming extends to the way the songs are arranged. While much electronic music is tightly constrained, programmed in blocks for maximum dancefloor response, sounds on Bloodline come and go freely, with a drum roll or a cymbal crash introduced because it feels right, rather than simply to mark the passing of 16 bars. Tempering these hard machine rhythms is a liberal sprinkling of melody that brings to mind the work of Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May. As May did on late-’80s tracks like “Nude Photo,” Julien scatters impassioned, jazzy touches on “IDK” and “Queen of Ungilsan” to offset his percussive thrust.
This is an album equally suited for swooning or raving, six tracks with enough thump for the dancefloor and enough brain food for the couch. Julien claims that Bloodline “feels more in your face sonically” than Fallen, and there is a certain raucousness to the drum sound on “Roll of the Dice” that wasn’t obvious on his debut. But the new record is more a companion piece to Fallen than a giant leap forward, a reminder that musical bloodlines runs deep and that simple machines can sing with soul. Ikutaro Kakehashi, who built his machines to favor ease of expression over virtuosity, would have approved.
