Bjarki, a producer from Iceland about which little else is known, is precocious even by the standards of European techno, in which new phenoms emerge before most Americans start driving. He has appeared early and often on Nina Kraviz’s burgeoning Trip label, and she has thrown her considerable taste-making weight behind him, featuring him prominently in mixes. Last year’s “I Wanna Go Bang” was a smash, the kind of “duh, of course”-techno track that immediately had everyone wondering how, in more than 30 years of making kick drums go “bum-bum-bum-bum,” no one had arrived at this particular combination of “bum bum” and hook (a sample from a mid-90s DJ Deeon intro): “Sometimes I feel like/I wanna go bang.” Bum-bum-bum-bum.
It seemed for a moment like Bjarki would be the hero European techno needs, making the kind of stoopid ragers that his peers were either too proud or too ambitious to regularly produce. Some tracks just need to exist, even if sampling a Chicago institution like Deeon is ballsy. But his entry in Resident Advisor's closely watched podcast series was an hour of his own unreleased tracks, an act of DJ solipsism usually reserved for more established and/or idiosyncratic artists. This year brought the announcement of three separate full-length releases on Trip—not albums, Bjarki maintains—an expunging of his archives that begins with Б (a cyrillic letter “romanized using the Latin letter B”), 13 rave tracks that have been making their way into Kraviz’s sets.
In its breadth and manner Б reveals something about Bjarki that a clutch of early tracks could not: he’s a staunch classicist, tidily moving through techno’s paradigms. Bjarki transitions easily between low culture—hoover bass, squiggly acid—and high—moony synth pads, sci-fi escapism, fussy IDM—resulting in something like a Noah’s Ark of tropes. Б is an oddly conservative collection, suggesting not a desire to bang the box but to make sure the box is neatly packed and properly labeled (witness the following track titles: “Here It Comes Can You Feel It 92 Hoover 2,” “Opalocka Acid Groove 12 Bit Mix,” the blatant Aphex-ism that is “Midi 14-Aug-2”). Bjarki finds a middle ground in which his music seems neither dated nor current; listening to Б is a little like watching a decade-old action movie with a sky-high budget.
There’s plenty of talent on display here, as Bjarki proves himself adept at all of these different styles. There's the ominous percussion of “Bbbbbbbbbbb render 2”; the grimy, erotic bassline of “It’s My Thing,” the easy way “The Lover That You Are” shimmies between bleary-eyed post-rave comedown and nervous tics. He’s naughtiest, and most potent, when incorporating short little vocal loops, which seem to bring out his most aggressive, percussive moments. But there's also too much limp mid-tempo breakbeat (“Son of a Son,” “Can a Man”) and silly mimicry, like the faux drama and cockpit ephemera of “As You Remember.”
You might alternately call Bjarki’s sound “timeless,” but I wonder about the value of timelessness in track-y techno. Great DJs can re-contextualize the old tracks, make us hear them anew; plenty of others can make us go bang by weaving together the current, however marginally different that current might sound at any given moment. This is how techno works, and even if you think it all kind of sounds the same, it tends to sound the same in clusters. Techno could use a lot of things—more diversity and more humor chief among them—but it probably doesn’t need the kind of overt classic rock gestures Bjarki is making here. Bjarki has two more collections coming this year, and has already proven himself a prolific producer with real talent, but Б doesn't take him, or us, anywhere.
