Signal

Following the turn of the 20th century, futurism was an astonishingly new and underappreciated artistic development. Luigi Russolo and his cynical cohorts revelled in the devastating nature of technology and the wars it encouraged, making music from its cold, dead essence. It could be said that techno is loosely, though not directly, generated from the futurist manifestos, incinerated and extracted from their essential designs. Instead of taking the raw sounds of machinery, it’s the technological innovations made possible by the techno-producing hardware that account for the industrial aesthetic. Robotron, the second collaboration between three East German giants known as Signal, is immaculate evidence of techno’s continued astonishment. Resembling everything from Pan Sonic to Audion, and embodying the very best of deep and dirty minimal techno, with beats like lighting, in power and crushing distortion, it mimics the sounds of a busy warehouse on the most carefully synthesised designer toxins. Who says real techno has to be underappreciated?