MORD x RYC (4xLP)

Celebrating ten years of uncompromising devotion to techno and its bastard cousins from the fringes, Rotterdam’s finest MORD and RYC team up to deliver a special four-vinyl / eight-sided kaleidoscope of a compilation, featuring some of the artists that have helped shape up both labels’ identities over the years as they press on in their aim to set their very own techno utopia into stone. – Adriana Lopez, Amotik, Bas Mooy, Brendon Moeller, Dimi Angelis, Inigo Kennedy, Jeroen Search, Kaiser, Norbak, Orphx, Quelza, Rene Wise, Ritzi Lee, Stanislav Tolkachev, The Lady Machine, UVB are all present! Unfolding as a testimony to their unflaggingly resolute vision and aspirations, ‘MORD x RYC’ operates as an ode to their hometown of Rotterdam – the artwork itself being a direct nod to the city’s iconic ‘cube houses’ from the 1980s, but also to the tentacular connection both MORD and RYC have developed throughout the past decade, bonding organically alongside like-minded artists and hubs from the techno internationals to expand their reach and impact. Ritzi Lee paves the way with ‘Neutropia’, a mind-bending, abstract-leaning head charge of frizzling electronics mixed with the unrelenting assault of a thousands bisons’ pack fracturing their way into your system. Amotik follows up with the paced-up bleepy madness that is ‘Laal’, a proper deep and raging slice of clinical machine hoodoo, geared up for hi-velocity rumble on the dance floor and a ruthless hi-jack of your brain capacities for the duration of the track. Up with the punishing club destroyer ‘Lucidez’, Norbak treats us to a maelstrom of choppy hardware currents and head-spinning strong winds criss-crossing a brutalistic mindset. Dimi Angelis ‘Optical Prism’ is one to play some nasty tricks on the mind and alter your body functions through its evil-minded thunder of processed drum prog, noise-adjacent projections and gusty, Dantesque atmosphere. Breathing in further acid wonkiness in his typically spaced-out composition with ‘Illustris’, Jeroen Search has us jacking to a weirdo concert of chord dissonance and punchy percs, whereas French exponent UVB lets the hounds of rave loose on the epic-sized ‘Mortifere’ – a strikingly potent piece of 909-fuelled dementia that unfurls with the fierce soul of a 90s scene warrior, and future-facing bravura of newfangled classics. Taking over on the rough and unfazed ‘Vedette’, MORD boss Bas Mooy gives his own definition of a quality industrial chugger, club-efficient and trimmed down to its most essential palette. Kaiser goes full-on martial style on ‘Disciplined Soldiers’, giving us a taste of his ever surgically executed blends, flush with the usual tapestry of lysergic synth swashes and nonstop pounding drums. Canadian duo Orphx step in with the rugged and opaque ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ – a much spitting glimpse of the sound they’ve come to advocate over the years, as raw as it proves oddly sensual, and as hypnotically entrancing as it remains mysterious to the bone. A riotous, pounding danse macabre that oozes tar fumes and heated steel, the Lady Machine’s ‘Concorde’ is no-prisoner techno in its purest essence, tailored to whip up a frenzy in any context, any time of the day. Walking the tightrope between an elevated sense of melodicism and mastered 4×4 uproar, Inigo Kennedy here again exposes the width of his skills when it comes to carving out durably haunting, soulful techno that sure knows how to harness energy and power from the ravers’ hearts, whereas Adriana Lopez ‘Gradual Illusion’ steers us back to a further exhausting state of sublimation, and then utter dissolution. Whiz kid Quelza pulls out a big one with ‘La Choregraphie Du Soleil’, a much ambitious slab of visionary techno, splattered with the kind of breathtaking arrangements and scope-breadth you’d expect from more seasoned producers. True to his high-flying standards, Ukrainian maestro Stanislav Tolkachev goes full mental style with ‘Must Be Loud’, a genetically modified treat that’ll get your senses in a weird sense of alert, while Rene Wise dishes out a massive burner in ‘Smashing Around’, as ever laser-precise and textured out to impressive effect. Brooklyn’s dub techno legend Brendon Moeller rounds off the package with the obsessively playful ‘Hot Pursuit’, sure to please all lovers of the US producer’s mind-altering modular style and upstream relevancy.