I feel like I’ve had this guy’s face staring at me from my review pile for ages. This album came out back in October and I saw a press release for it before it came out, so it’s about time I get around to reviewing it. This is the first full-length release on Cómeme, a label co-run by Matias Aguayo, who guests on this album along with fellow Kompakt regular Superpitcher. Rebolledo hails from Mexico, and runs a club in Monterrey called TOPAZdeluxe. As a producer, he constructs repetitive, slowly-building minimal techno with some slightly unconventional, ear-catching instruments. Most notably, plenty of shakers and other hand percussion, and the types of organs you might expect Kraut or garage rock bands to use rather than a house producer. He also tends to loop vocal phrases and treat them as another instrument, but not quite to the extent that Aguayo does, especially considering that his last album was almost entirely a capella. Even though the tracks generally have 4/4 electronic beats, they don’t all feel like dancefloor material, especially a track like “Aire Caliente”, which features hypnotic, pulsating synths and trippy, far-off vocals. The beats have an incidental pacing to them, accented by stuttering echo, and only the last 2 minutes of the track feature 4/4 beats. The first of two Aguayo-starring tracks, “La Pena”, is slower and cumbia-influenced, with more stuttery echno-accented beats. The other, “Super Vatos”, pits horror-movie organs against Aguayo’s double-time vocals. “Corvette Ninja”, named after another bar Rebolledo opened, is an appropriately driving electro-house track with revving car engine effects. The album concludes with “Te Conozco Moscow”, a drum battle with Phillipp Gorbachev, which features thundering drum kits and a throbbing bass pulse.
The ten tracks on this album clock in at slightly less than an hour, but it seems to fly by in about half that time. The album is constantly changing and adding unexpected new elements. Definitely a very creative, distinctive debut.
