Anyone who caught Sebastian Züger and Thomas Kapeller’s We Built This City, a documentary on electronic music from Cologne, Germany will remember Dominik Eulberg. He’s the shy producer obsessed with the natural world who’d much rather be interviewed in a wildlife park than, say, the Kompakt offices or his home studio. This obsession leaks into his recordings, as Eulberg mixes birdsong at low level into Bionik’s carefully constructed opener, “Der Traum Vom Fliegen.”
It’s tempting to mine those nature/techno parallels, and Eulberg’s long, twisting slices of Techno often reflect the planned chaos of the everyday. While not as (g)loopy as Ricardo Villalobos, the combination of heavyweight bass and pinging patterns on tracks like “Bienenstich” recalls albums like Villalobos’s The Au Harem d’Archimede, albeit fed through comparatively more consensual logic. Even when Eulberg is at his most straightforward, as on “Autopfoten,” a bare production with tiny bossa presets shooting out from a stark rhythmic frame, his touch is still relatively light. For some reason, everything here feels as though it skims across the water, most particularly on the sad-eyed melancholy of “Libellenwellen,” where a slow-drag melody wells up like tears in a child’s eyes.
Diorama