Reminiscencias

With a name like Binary Algorithms, you might expect the Colombian artist to make pitch-black techno that sounds like sheet metal wobbling in a freeway underpass. But Andrés Ávila’s approach to dance music is bold and saturated, with drums and synths blown up into big, skeuomorphic shapes. Ávila’s records have an ambitious conceptual bent to match their sounds. Previous EPs have been themed around René Descartes’ thought applied to a “cyber-network environment,” or a Drexciya-referencing underwater civilization called Tunja from the year 2499, accompanied by political screeds about the whitewashing of electronic music or the moral quandaries of AI. On Reminiscencias, his debut album, Ávila looks away from sci-fi and toward his own life and upbringing in Colombia, writing techno tracks so big (and big-hearted) that it feels like you could reach out and touch them.

Reminiscencias has an epic sweep, layering heart-tugging melodies with the rumbling sounds of traffic and urban life. Ávila is something of a sound design prodigy. In his hands, synths can sound like Hollywood strings (“Cenizas”), and arp notes wobble and glow like lightbulb filaments (“Something to Fight For”). Polished drums tap out funky, broken patterns with just the right amount of force, enough to rattle windows without the bass blotting everything else out. There’s an inviting quality to this production style, where everything feels like it exists in a discrete, three-dimensional space.

These tendencies lend Reminiscencias a larger-than-life quality that channels ’00s thriller scores crossed with early-’10s techno, recalling a time when Berghain still drove (or at least lorded over) underground nightlife culture. It’s easy to imagine “To Resist and Break,” with its foreboding bassline and whip-crack drums, soundtracking a tense pursuit from The Bourne Identity, but there’s also a stirring emotional undercurrent in the vein of E.R.P. or the Exaltics—artists who sneak stately melodies into tracks that are precision engineered for the club. Throughout the LP, dance tracks are broken up by sketches that are a notch above the usual techno album interludes, like “Clamor de Dolor,” which makes me think of a church organist trying to play a Burial tune.

There are a few straight-up techno barnstormers here, like acid-flecked fever dream “Frágiles,” but Reminiscencias is at its best when the rhythms are more syncopated and unexpected sounds unexpectedly fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Detroit electro goes with flamboyant hand drumming on “Sub-Periphery,” dub-techno chords bubble up on “To Resist and Break,” and “Future[Delusion]” splits the difference between peak-period Shed and Involver-era Sasha. At some point the techno label feels inadequate: Ávila makes familiar but just-novel-enough dance music out of the remnants of electro, prog house, drum’n’bass, breaks, and dub. It’s like throwing logs into a woodchipper and making new, weirder trees out of the chips.

For all its resistance-themed song titles, chord progressions that sound like vague calls to action, and talk about Latin American identity, Reminiscencias keeps its cards close to its chest. A text accompanying the album notes that while Latin dance music is often reduced to “tropical” sounds, this record is meant to feel more urban—but that’s the closest thing to a story or guiding theme here. In an era obsessed with identity and subtext (or sometimes just plain-old text) Reminiscencias lets dance music live on its own terms, as much for the dancefloor or the living room as you want it to be. There’s not a single word, or snippet of human voice, anywhere on the LP. Instead, there are only broad strokes of fear, hope, triumph, and resignation. It’s an old-school approach to techno focused on the inhuman sound of machines, infused with a spirit so expansive that the meaning is universal anyway.