Compiling several years worth of material and spanning nearly two hours, the Munich producers first full-length since 2018 feels cohesive, virtuosic, and thrillingly physical. Skee Maskput out apair of EPsthat felt like dueling reactions to lockdown blues, then stretching into month five in much of Europe and North America. In the sudden and prolonged absence of nightlife,ISS05s unruly club cuts seemed to kick against the strictures of enforced downtime. OnISS06, on the other hand, a succession of beatless ambient tracks succumbed to numbing torpor. While some frustrated DJs distracted themselves by baking bread, the Munich producer just kept cutting up breakbeats. Mere weeks after the release of those records, Skee Mask, aka Bryan Mller,tweetedthat he had yet another album in the can. At long last,Pool, released without advance warning is the promised fruit of that harvest.

Particularly in the case of dance music, a style predicated upon sweaty bodies swapping aerosols in close quarters, its hard not to read any given new release as a response to the pandemic year. But despite the timing of its completion,Poolisn’t a report on the doldrums of 2020. Its 18 tracks, totaling an hour and 45 minutes, are drawn from the past four or five years of his daily studio regimen. Combined with its surprise release on Bandcamp, the records length and semi-archival naturesome of these songs predate the release of 2018sCompromight suggest that Pool is a clearinghouse of orphaned tracks meant to bide time before the next proper album. But Mllercallsit a fully conceived project, the intended successor toCompro. (For now, there are no plans to make the album available beyond Bandcamp: I just dont get positive energy from [streaming] companies, and I wanted to send a message to other artists that they didnt have to put their music on these platforms, Mller recently said in an interview with Pitchfork contributor Shawn ReynaldosFirst Floornewsletter.)

Where Skee Masks last EPs split his output between rhythm and atmosphere,Poolbrings those elements back together. Mller continues to work with the types of sounds that have animated his work from the beginning: scabrous breaks and clean-lined 808s, seismic subs and airy pads, smoldering overdrive and dub delay. In the past, Skee Masks genre experiments have sometimes felt like he was checking various styles off a list, butPoolshows his work becoming more holistic, moving toward a kind of ur-dance musicas though the disparate continents of drumnbass, footwork, techno, electro, and downbeat were all merging back together into a spongy musical Pangaea. Twisting acid sequences give otherwise gentle ambient tracks a steely edge; funk basslines wriggle worm-like through drumnbass grooves; rugged jungle breaks and ambient dub flicker like two sides of a lenticular image. via Pitchfork

Label:Ilian Tape
Format:3 x Vinyl, 12″, Album, 180 g
Released: 2021
Genre:Electronic
Style:Techno, Ambient, Breakbeat, Drum n Bass

File under: House / Electro / Techno