Rock Like This EP – Mulen LP 03

By now a very well-recognised trailblazer of the minimal house and techno circuits, iO Mulen (Aleksandr Voznichenko) shares his third album, Rock Like This, through his own Mulen imprint. Refusing to fall back on heavy-handed press notes, the eight tracks on this perfect composite storm are enough to bewitch us of their own accord. These house and techno retrofusions play out like the kind of sounds that the impossible dangling contraption depicted on its front cover might generate; ‘Rock Like This’ throws back to Chicago deep house and jankout acid trance, magicking up a shockingly good fusion of disparate styles in a bionic mode, while the rising actions of ‘How Do You Say’ and ‘Emergency’ teem with twin enjoyments of and reverences for 90s Euro and acid techno. There are cosmic-trancier subplots on there too, such as ‘I’m Waiting For’, which selects its constituent sounds with an aesthete’s ear, striking a difficult balance of the raw and the fine. Voznichenko refuses to privilege one referent genre over another, and it results in a respectfully done, carefully made and truly exciting dance record, unafraid of cheese nor sophistication, and reconciling the two.

Rock Like This EP – Mulen LP 03