Available on: Ostgut-Ton 12″
Samples here

Over the past few years, Berlin’s Ostgut Tonträger has risen to the status of one of techno’s most universally-acclaimed and widely-loved labels, its name a synonym for brilliant dance music.  The label’s 2010 output has been prolific as ever, pumping out three excellent album-length offerings in Dettmann, Ben Klock’s Berghain 04 mix and Shed’s forthcoming The Traveller, but its twelve-inch output has been sadly flagging in quality. Uncharacteristically steeped in mediocrity this year, Ostgut redeems itself in a big way with the latest from Luke Slater, reviving his L.B. Dub Corp alias for two vicious bangers.

Slater isn’t quite as punishing under this alias as he was with Planetary Assault Systems’ Ostgut releases last year, but what he loses in speed he makes up for in solid-body power. ‘Take It Down (In Dub)’ is twelve minutes of pure sensual hatred, the sound of someone who has listened to too much cookie-cutter dub-techno. Slater lays a hammering beat down over layers of incisively abrasive static, a haze that morphs unpredictably and fluidly over the track’s twelve minutes; it’s like dub-techno in reverse, where the atmospherics are abused and twisted by the unquestionable dominance of the drums. No matter how much the track’s cloudy backdrop churns and contorts, sometimes channeling itself into penetrative limbs and at one point even fashioning its own distorted beat to combat the existing one, the primacy of that triple-pronged drum asserts itself in some dazed state of supremacy through mere existence.

The other side is shorter at a scant seven minutes, and its roving, hypnotic bassline paints it as something akin to deep house. This one centers around its woozy synths that seem to sustain perpetually, dressing themselves up with ornamental strings and psychedelic keys. What’s most surprising is how Slater brings in a simple piano riff halfway through, taking the ultra-cliched house piano and immersing it in dread, and perhaps more surprising is its effectiveness. In creating his typically brutal techno (indeed, Slater’s work is brutal at any speed), he’s come closest to reproducing what Terre Thaemlitz outlined in his magnificent Midtown 120 Blues as the origin of true “deep house”: “sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship, all at 120 beats-per-minute.” Not bad for a producer known almost exclusively for steely techno.

Andrew Ryce