There are two great challenges for a techno record: telling a story (which is still easy to achieve through a DJ-set) and combining this story with a statement. In a few cases, one of these two approaches succeeds, but there are hardly any cases in which both do at the same time. David Letellier didn’t start his career as Kangding Ray in the techno scene – he rather grew into it from ambient, approaching the dancefloor one by one. It’s not because the French musician is bowing to the market’s mechanisms, but rather because he interprets the non-place of the club as a political one. His fifth record as Kangding Ray has quickly followed last year’s »Solens Arc«, Letellier’s straightest record, so far. »Cory Arcane« is geared to the fictional character of the same name, and even though it appears quite female in the cover art work, its first name suggests both sexes, while the last name could be neither. It’s exactly the same way that »Cory Arcane« knows how to play with musical ambiguities: While, for example, the kicks are following the four-to-the-floor dictum, there is so much happening around them that it’s impossible to relate one to the other, which is why these nine tracks won’t be sold as simple peak-time-tools. It’s quite the other way around, really: The apparent simplicity opens up to an intense complexity when looking at the tracks individually. Like the cover-artwork for »Cory Arcane«, Kangding Ray’s music on this record knows how to sensitively weave subtlety into the big picture. Hence, it can’t function as a narration in its traditional sense because it’s too complex and too ambiguous. However, it turns the story into a statement, which, like the music, appears simple while coming along with a double bottom. Letellier’s techno-sketches clearly state (without being definite) that things are more complex than they appear to be. And how could a message be more political, especially in times that are heavily influenced by black and white thinking?
Cory Arcane
