Dutch Techno luminary Steve Rachmad delivers a masterstroke with his latest LP ‘Light and Time’ for Dekmantel
With over 4 decades experience of working across electronic music in various shapes and guises, breaking new ground for any artist is no mean feat – especially when your body of work is vast. Steve Rachmad has spent many years refining his art and practice, built on a healthy discourse between the roots of Detroit soul and Dutch prowess – all propelled by the endless possibilities which analogue machinery offers.
It’s fair to say not many figures have influenced European techno quite like he has, through an array of aliases such as Sterac, Parallel 9, Scorp and Sterac Electronics among many others. Having made an indelible mark with his 1995 album The Secret Life Of Machines under his Sterac alias, he’s been a central figure ever since.
With his latest LP ‘Light And Time’ just landed on Dekmantel, Rachmad has chosen to take a well placed step beyond the dancefloor, dialling up the symphonic dimensions of his musicality. He delivers a widescreen 15 track trip into techno and electronica’s outer reaches that wholeheartedly embrace IDM and minimalist aesthetics with cinematic soundscapes and sensibility, all wrapped in a radiant shroud of cosmic warmth that bears his unique signature.
Whilst much of Rachmad’s studio practice has been squarely focused on finding harmony between synths and drum machines over the years, his time during COVID was spent exploring the world of film scoring. During this period, he allowed himself to experiment with Native Instruments’ sampling software Kontakt, learning to arrange and layer orchestral instrumentation. As someone who rarely used sampling in his music before, the distinct fluctuations of recorded orchestral players opened up a new dimension, which became the foundation for this new LP. Which resulted in Rachmad playing much more of the album by hand, after years of allowing precise machine pulses to drive the flow of his music making.
From the outset of the opening salvo of ‘Reality Programmers’ and ‘Quantum Infiltrators’, he establishes a shift into shimmering synthesis, scratchy rhythms and airy orchestral swells, gloriously combining to lift you forward to a meditative state where he allows all the elements space to breathe, before gently revealing more layers.
‘Silent Revolution’ introduces a little more percussion, though rhythm remains secondary to the atmosphere he builds. Rather than chasing tension through impact, each string phrase and melodic fragment carries a quiet weight. All of which slows to a halt as you reach the dramatic folds of ‘The Field of Reality’. A pattern which he likes to repeat over the course of the album. You’ll find him taking on various forms as he dips into low-slung electro soul for ‘Invisible Warriors Of Light’, or drags you in further with the intense pulses of ‘Redhead’, only to find release with sparse metronomic qualities of ‘Multidimensional Bridge’.
By the time you reach the alien notes of ‘Encrypted Instructions’, string samples are shot through an angular lens to close the album on an experimental flourish. Underlining his approach which seeks to escape the restrictions of a funneled dogmatic approach.
Whilst some of the passages tug at the heart, some quietly generate unease whilst others drift along that are simply content simply to exist. All bound together by a magnetic force of restraint that proves to be the album’s defining quality. Rachmad’s long and winding history in electronic music naturally lends itself to this mode of expression, and we certainly won’t argue with the end result. ‘Light and Time’ is a sumptuous, multifaceted album that showcases the depths of his musicality and talent.
