Abe Duque

Abe Duque began making beats back in 1988. He’s considered one of the godfathers of techno, and has recorded under five different aliases for labels as far and wide as Mille Plateaux and Warner. Going through DJ Hell’s Gigolo imprint this time, the tracks on So Underground It Hurts are a collection of singles packaged as a full-length album, and as such every track on here has different intentions. The end result is a full-throttled drive through the history of club music from techno, acid, and electro to Chicago, Detroit, and Berlin. But Abe Duque’s version of that drive can be a disjointed one. Contrary to the advice Hell gives the producer in the opening lines of the press sheet, seven releases do not make an album, they only make an album’s worth of material. Although he covers a lot of ground here, these tracks never quite find what they’re after. In this long form, there’s staleness to the assembly of tracks like "Give It To Her Good” and "Acid.” They only go so far as to cover the generic basics of their respective genres. They’re still functioning as the DJ tools they were intended to be, with only some of the immediacy fostered by twelve-inch culture, but out of the mix they sound belated.