Mudpool Opal
Kept Running
Kino Disk
Basic Channel might be more popular now than they were in the ’90s, when the German duo were actively releasing records. Their work is certainly being referenced a whole lot these days, and not just by journalists drooling over every new Peak Oil and West Mineral Ltd. release. An entire wave of dub techno and dub techno-adjacent artists has emerged, all of them cooking up batches of free-floating minimalism and dubby abstraction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; this trend, or whatever you want to call it, has birthed some truly excellent music during the past few years, and First Floor has admittedly sung its praises as loudly as any other outlet. Even so, now that we’ve reached a moment where Pitchfork is casually slapping “Best New Music” on the latest Short Span offering, it’s hard not to wonder when the dub techno hype bubble is going to burst.
In the meantime though, at least some of that hype is spilling onto Kino Disk, a Chicago-based outpost that, to its credit, has largely kept its head down. Shunning the content-driven, always-be-promoting mentality that has come to define much of modern music culture—even in its independent and supposedly “underground” corners—the label has instead chosen to let the music do the talking, dropping a steady stream of limited-edition records, most of them 7-inch and 10-inch dubplates. (As you might expect, those records now tend to sell out instantly, but anyone who’s content with digital files should know that the bulk of Kino Disk’s back catalog is currently available via “name your price” downloads on Bandcamp.)
Cynics might see this low-key approach as its own form of marketing—or anti-marketing, to use a current buzzword. And maybe it is, but what Kino Disk is doing also feels decidedly old-school, and it’s further bolstered by the fact that the artists on its roster tend to share the label’s aversion to self-promotion; if they’re not entirely anonymous, they at least seem reluctant to documenting every single aspect of their existence online.
Mudpool Opal, for example, is a complete question mark. The vaporous pads and scuttling grooves that populate Kept Running definitely don’t sound like the work of a rookie producer, but technically speaking, the three-track effort is the project’s debut. (Details about who is behind that project, however, or where they come from, have not been shared.) Minimal but never sparse, the music is full of familiar touchstones—Echospace, Huerco S., Topdown Dialectic and yes, Basic Channel—and though it slots in somewhere below the dub techno umbrella, it’s only “techno” in the loosest sense of the term. Mudpool Opal’s productions are far too amorphous for that, and the scattered bits of percussion that do appear are more like textural accoutrements than anything resembling a danceable rhythm. Weightlessness is arguably the record’s defining characteristic, and there’s something unmistakably compelling about the undulations of its flickering digital synths.
Will the warm glow of those synths draw in more tastemaker types? Probably, but that’s not Kino Disk’s fault, and those who’ve already cottoned on to what the label is doing would be wise to relish records like Kept Running now—before the hype machine reaches critical mass.