Onur Özer

Turkey’s Onur Özer has been causing quite the sensation on the minimal techno circuit in the last year, a buzz largely built upon his original recordings for the Vakant imprint and his highly prized DJ sets. Here, Berlin’s notable Watergate Club has commissioned a DJ mix from Özer that offers a suitable introduction to his style and tendencies. Özer belongs to a new generation of minimal technophiles (including Canada’s Guillaume Coutu-Dumont and Germany’s Mathias Kaden) who are improvising with Akufen’s micro-sampling styles on top of a decidedly polyphonic rhythm structure that often appropriates the more transcendental, festive qualities of Eastern or African indigenous music. This latter quality has a direct lineage to Ricardo Villallobos’ recordings, and as this mix offers a bit more minimal than polyphony, fans of Villalobos’ relatively straight Fabric 36 or even Akufen’s Fabric 17 will find a fitting companion piece in this Watergate mix. Minimal mainstays like Cabanne, Cassy and Sammy Dee mix fluidly with lesser knowns like Ralph Sliwinski, Abonne and William Kouam Djoko. The mix finishes off with two Özer originals that showcase just what all the fuss is about, and by disc’s end, one wishes that this obviously talented producer and DJ had opted to follow this strain of k-hole rhythmic adventurism more thoroughly throughout the mix.