Blue Hour
Selva
Blue Hour
Luke Standing’s career is a microcosm of UK techno’s evolution in the 2000s. He grew up in Brighton listening to hardcore and jungle tapes before moving to Bristol for university and becoming immersed in that city’s dubwise scene. His earliest releases as Furesshu capture the moment when dubstep was becoming techno and techno was becoming dubstep. After university, though, he moved to Berlin around 2010 (also a vital part of UK techno’s story), where he started releasing harder-edged sounds as Blue Hour and, as the name might suggest, the music had a slightly melancholic feel to it.
Since then, he’s built up an impressive catalog of contemporary UK techno, brushing shoulders with the Berghain crowd (a track of his appeared on Function’s mix for the club), but also dabbling further afield with genres like trance (his remix of Agent Orange’s classic “Warm Love” is an absolute banger). Even with this CV, Standing has never quite reached the level of accolades as some of his Bristol or Berlin peers, but his debut LP, Selva, might finally get him the flowers he deserves.
Listened to one way, the record is a retrospective. We start with the bass-inflected techno of Bristol on “Arrival,” move into vintage Ostgut-style sounds with “The Chase,” get a taste of haunted trance on “Submerged” and finish off with some grown-up ambient thanks to “Portal.” But the record offers more than a tour of Standing’s greatest hits. On “Hidden Passages,” plaintive chords quiver on the edges of the stereo alongside the steel-soldered hand drums that makes a perfect duet of the tough and tender. And you’d be hard pressed to find a better piece of eerie afterparty psychedelia than the nightmare-inducing “Dreamscape.” Selva, in other words, showcases the versatile sound of a veteran producer who has built a career in dark rooms and knows exactly what works.
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