Batu / Donato Dozzy – Exhale

Where others switch the beat to permanent illumination, Batu and Donato Dozzy let it flicker nervously. Batu, real name Omar McCutcheon, founder of the Timedance label and a fuser of UK bass and techno, and Dozzy, an Italian ambient-techno veteran, have made an album together. The Cologne authority Wolfgang Voigt once said that the kick drum was the »non-negotiable primal signal of techno«. That there is, after all, more room for negotiation within the genre is shown by Batu and Donato Dozzy. Exhale is a techno album, but one that swings far to the right and left.

Batu supplies the offbeats and polyrhythms that give some tracks an Afrobeat-like feel, while Dozzy acts as the gifted sound architect he simply is. His reverberant and psychedelically charged contributions usually play out in the background, however – the star is the syncopated beat. »Drift« is the exception to the polyrhythmic rule; otherwise, Exhale is not the album on which the kick drum ticks through like an ultra-precise clockwork.