Earth Trax has already tried his hand at all sorts of genres across his discography. The Polish producer really became known in 2020 with LP1, on which he astutely thought squeaky rave and trance à la Bicep together, in serotonin-heavy fashion. In between, there was ambient too; on Everlasting Flame, introversion and endurance are now trumps, resulting in somnambulant dub techno.
The opener »In the Zone«, with its compact drumming, could have come from Vril, while the masterpiece »Wait and See«, placed second, condenses with metallic clinking, constant pad-shimmer and subaquatic rumbling, as with Porter Ricks, towards an emotional climax: at this point, the functional dub-techno trot recedes into the background in favour of a melancholy piano loop, as though one had been invited out of the main room of the flat-share party and into a devotional private audience in a room with a Yamaha keyboard and heaps of monsteras. Some may call this unusual symbiosis kitschy; in fact, one of the main qualities in Earth Trax’s music is his ability to wrest depth from exactly such moments, to fill them with life – something that, in places, recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s alias GAS.
As the album continues, Bartosz Kruczyński navigates longing, sometimes depressive-seeming pop tropes, helium voices included, which feels as though Burial had produced muzak for submarines in the 2000s. This daring, too – the willingness to rethink connections between genres – is what distinguishes Earth Trax.
Everlasting Flame
