Rating: 7.5 / Format: CD/LP / Label: AW-Recordings 

Let’s be honest: all that hopelessly nouveau Detroit-revering techno you hear these days hasn’t dulled the appeal of considered, real-deal Motor City-style machine-soul. For every shitty post-Innervisions non-entity crowding the racks of your local record store, labels like Delsin and Styrax continue to put out bright, non-linear and emotive productions which strive to connect with the real essence of the Detroit mythos rather than simply ape the production tics and tricks of its founding fathers.

Arne Weinberg, for example, has just got on with it – making crisp, funked-up and rhythmically challenging techno that owes a monumental debt to Mssrs Atkins, Saunderson and May, not to mention Craig, but has its own ideas and, moreover, identity. Alpha & Omega is the second album of his career, the follow-up to 2007’s Path Of The Gods, and it places studio-fresh productions alongside older tracks culled from past 12” releases, notably the 16-minute beatless epic ‘Leviathan’. It’s not the only ambient track here – see also the fantastically gloomy ‘Nightflight on Dark Wings’: not so much a track as a Caretaker-style (it too weighs in at 15+ minutes – Weinberg is nothing if not good value). ‘Conaesthesia’ , on the other hand, sounds like nothing so much as a Deepchord/Echospace off-cut.

In the main, Weinberg’s at his best when drums are involved. On ‘Everlasting’ he stakes out fertile ground somewhere in between insectoid Villalobosian minimalism and classic Detroit synth padding, the surrounding lattice of faintly ethnic pipe sounds putting me in mind of John Beltran’s Earth & Nightfall. ‘Never Surrender’ and ‘Eclectic Spiral’ shimmer wistfully; the heavy analogue jam ‘Nightstalker’ is more dancefloor-oriented, like Redshape but without – for better or worse – the masked fellow’s surgical focus. ‘Arcane’ has a broken dubstep-cum-IDM quality; both ‘Alpha (Intro)’ and Omega (Outro) deliver the same serotonin-depleted romanticism of Amber-era Autechre – a resounding complement if ever there was one.

Bobby Busaru

Arne Weinberg myspace