»Otro Mundo« is the best techno EP of the year, that much is certain, it’s just that for some reasons it starts out like a Björk album. Lindsey Wang has been kicking up neon dust for quite some time with her releases and DJ sets under the name Polygonia, although the parameters of her sound aesthetic seem relatively unhip at first: Her music moves back and forth between deep techno and ambient through the flora and fauna of different worlds, most of which are home to the kinds of festivals where they offer shamanism workshops alongside henna tattoo stations. Nevertheless, the Munich IO co-founder does it differently, i.e. in exactly the right way, positioning herself outside of potentially esoteric genres just as much as far beyond the conventionally joyless warehouse techno that otherwise dominates the status quo. Which brings us back to »Otro Mundo« (yes, that means »Otherworld«), which, after the wonderful IDM-art-pop mash-up that kicks off the whole thing contrasts bleepy melodies and pumping grooves with a canon of strange sounds that could probably best be described as the canon of underwater insects on »Mind Alteration.« The slo-mo chugger »Implosion of the Known« then takes this free play with the contradiction between known formulas and unknown, uncomfortable sounds to the extreme, before »Never Have I Seen…« first presents us with the hot, high-gloss variant of the Príncipe sound and »Twirling Membrane« combines the no-holds-barred-rave-energy of Singeli with the Karl-Marx-Stadt understatement of the raster clique and the shoot-from-the-hip avant-gardism of the Livity crew. In short, »Otro Mundo« is the best techno EP of the year, even though and precisely because it only ever makes indirect concessions to the conventions of this genre.
Otro Mundo
