- Retrofuturist techno that paints the picture of a world on the brink of doom.
- Tracing Xircles' most recent release Xenolith feels timely. Although Luke Standing and Simon Pilkington (Blue Hour and AJ-X, respectively) may not have intended the EP to land a short while after The Matrix's fourth installment or news of Spotify's CEO investing $133 million in an AI defence technology startup, the release feels like a mirror of this increasingly dystopian moment in technological history.
On this EP Tracing Xircles remold vintage progressive house, jungle and rave styles to match them up with techno's larger-than-life current moment, using reverb to maximum effect. The music sounds huge, but moves with a sense of impending doom. Take the title track. The chords are melancholy, almost stately, but the stuttering vocals and jungle-flavored breakbeats add urgency—it sounds paranoid more than anything else. "Surface Level" is more cartoonish, with bouncy synth strings and a robust low-end that lifts the mood—you could imagine it as the score to a battle scene in an old sci-fi movie.
The halftime drum & bass of "Blindspot" brings the EP to a spaced-out, almost ambient atmosphere, with a more sedate tempo and the occasional pitched-up vocal. Standing and Pilkington intensify this vibe on "Closed Circuit," but there's a ravey aesthetic this time. Yes, the glitchy FX, caustic acid lines and cyborg vocals are still there, but a colossal drop around three-and-a-half minutes in turns it into a peak-time banger despite the moodiness. While Tracing Xircles portray a world on the brink of doom, they do it with color and verve, blasting through the bleakness.
Lista de sequência de músicas01. Xenolith
02. Surface Level
03. Blindspot
04. Closed Circuit