- Barcelona duo Downliners Sekt mastered their brooding sound with a trilogy of EPs in 2010 and 2011—Meet The Decline, Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation and We Make Hits, Not The Public. Full of crumbling industrial rhythms, epic crescendoes and immersive field recordings, their music was like post-rock broken into quantized chunks. Since those breakthrough releases, the group have moved cautiously towards techno, slowly shedding the grisly broken beats in favour of rounder curves. After signing to InFiné, they completed their first full-length since 2008, reconciling their darker impulses with a more floor-friendly style.
Opener "Soul Débris" soars gracefully across its eight long minutes, with a glowing spoken-word sample that creates an unusually sunny mood. Along with "Junior High" and "This American Life," it's the duo's most straightforward work in a long time, more influenced by the drift of dub techno than the UK and IDM that lorded over their earlier material. Menace lurks, but it keeps to the background. Static eats away at the edges of "Soul Débris," and quick, startling sounds burst and die out in a mere moment. Relegating these devices to the peripheries makes for a smoother whole, but it's easy to miss the unpredictability of older tracks like "Hockey Nights In Canada."
"Balt Shakt," a two-part single that preceded Silent Ascent last year, forms a bridge between the group's then and now. These two are pockmarked by blinding chords and packed with murmuring vocal samples, sometimes pleasant and sometimes sinister. The title track, meanwhile, hearkens back to their old sound with a windswept garage beat, sweeping chords and a buzzing climax that'd make Explosions In The Sky turn their heads.
There's a moment late into the album when the quiet hiss of "Etern" erupts into a twisted trance reverie, overdriven and decaying as if the duo had picked up a dying signal in their studio. That transient piece of melody seems almost impossible in the context of Silent Ascent, which funnels the dark energies of the duo's old work into something more seamless. Like some of 2014's other great techno albums—Francis Harris' Minutes Of Sleep or Efdemin's Decay—Silent Ascent finds tension in confident, mature composition.
Tracklist01. Soul Débris
02. Silent Ascent
03. This American Life
04. Hors Phase
05. Balt Shakt I
06. Eiger Dreams
07. Reversal
08. Junior High
09. Etern
10. Balt Shakt II
11. Once Mercurial
12. Give Him Your Heart