As a label, Die Orakel lives up to its name again and again: Oliver Hafenbauer regularly makes the sound of tomorrow audible today, even if that sometimes involves going back to the past. The Frankfurt producer n9oc has attracted attention with a few compilation contributions in the past two years, and now »Memory Allocator« is the first independent release by N. T. Uyên Nguyễn. The six tracks are infused with the spirit of the groundbreaking Warp series »Artificial Intelligence«: IDM and British ambient techno are clear references, but the overall sound is very modern and anything but retro. Although pieces like »Entity« or the title track take their cues from the musical language of acts like B12 or Aphex Twin, they translate it into a different, contemporary idiom. And where »Q« and »U« make you think of kankyō ongaku, there are also plenty of aesthetic and rhythmic twists that give them a very unique thrust. With »Explorer 2.0« and »Inverted Refractions,« n9oc underlines her claim to expand upon stylistic formulas: the first track is a haunting and innovative interpretation of electro, on a par with Objekt, Lanark Artefax, or DJ Stingray, the other brings together slick raster noton-like sound design with the gruff, jerky rhythms of today’s experimental club music. Nguyễn proceeds like a chemist, extracting individual molecular compounds of traditional and contemporary genres and setting them in motion with each other. It’s a forward-looking research in sound.
Memory Allocator
