Chris Jongkind

Most of what you’d hear on London, ON-based musician Chris Jongkind’s seventh full-length album, Sumitomo Steel, are minimal progressive tech-house tracks in a similar vein to the dark, murky, minimal club bangers of some of Windsor and Detroit’s best techno producers from the Plus 8 and M-nus labels. There is an endurance in these tracks that promises to intimately shake some bodies on the dance floor. Some stretch over ten minutes, wandering occasionally into the realm of psychedelia while still practising an utterly sanitary precision with a 4/4 beat. "Shibuya,” "Rammed Earth” and "Northwest Tokyo” exhibit minimal techno in its purest form: stripped down, driving bass beats from a 909 and a strategic, raw splattering of keys, synths and vocals that sound distorted, as if from a broken radio transmission. "Nishi Shinjuku” however, takes on the qualities of minimal trance, revealing Jongkind’s musical tastes he explored in much of his earlier work. "Robo-Hamsters” is melodic techno perhaps aspiring to the blissed-out, ethereal sound of Aphex Twin’s ambient works. Sumitomo Steel appears committed to maintaining the presence of a skeletal, minimal sound on dance floors but also infuses this rawness with influences from trance and progressive.