HESSLE AUDIO SHOWCASE @ DECIBEL FESTIVAL

      Decibel Festival Recap - Hessle Audio Showcase

So, wow. Pangaea, Ben UFO, and Pearson Sound pretty much tag-teamed all-night starting at 2:00 AM. I haven’t been following the output of the holy trinity as steadily as I did back in the Down With You days, and honestly I was expecting a lot more broken beat tracks to make up the set, and they dropped their fair share of these, but the predominant theme of the evening / early morning was techno.

Like I said I haven’t been following Hessle’s output as much as I should (shame) and I had no idea this is the s**t these dudes were into these days. The linked track, Power Drumsss, is Pearson Sound’s own production and as you can hear it’s very much in the forward bass camp, but track’s like Power Drumsss were only dropped in the set one out of every five songs and the other four were techno.

I should clarify, as techno is a mutt of a genre. Hessle Audio techno is somewhere in between house and techno but it absolutely not tech-house. It’s like, you take the idea of minimal, pounding techno and throw in a ton of drum machine percussion and sparingly implement some obscure sample or unsettling distorted minimal chords / keys and you’re getting kind of close to what they were dropping. For lack of a better term it’s like subtle, jacking techno that you can simultaneously rage to groove to without losing your cool. Definitely not jam-packed with mid-range noise, and definitely not conventional drippy dub, spacey, or dark techno.

Moral of the story is that the set banged. Definitely helped me to understand that techno can be pretty accessible if you carefully blend it with house concepts, vs. the pounding death knell that conventional techno exudes that it’s very easy for normies to turn up their noses to.

Thanks Ben, Pearson, and Pangy.

PS: Ben UFO referred to Pangaea’s techno contribution as “the best” “oingy boingy” techno out there. So I guess the industry term for their type of techno is “oingy boingy.” Use it in conversation and people will think you are SUPER in-the-know.

This post was originally featured on Life Crushed

Written by Aaron