A Real Heartthrob

Jesse Siminski, aka Heartthrob, has a new album coming out on June 30th. It’s a minimal techno record, or just a techno record even. The whole sub-generic minimal thing is getting a bit schminimal in my humble opinion, and in the humble opinion of Kompakt boss man and Gas innovator, Wolfgang Voigt who, in a recent Wire magazine interview, decried the quality of the music in this late, inundated phase of the game. Luckily Mr. Siminski has just recently stepped onto the field. He debuted in ’05, and last year’s “Baby Kate,” and “Nasty Girl,” singles really cemented his renown in the crafting of tough, yet flexible electronic dance music that lumps brutal rhythms in with pretty, but odd, melodies and impossible bass lines.

His new long player, Dear Painter, Paint Me on Minus, is more of the above. It shunts, kicks, swerves, squelches and pummels in a harmonious fashion, even when it’s being dissonant. It makes you dream in equal measures about alien landscapes, dark skinned beauties replete with a fine mist of perspiration in Barcelona clubs (remember women perspire, as does any focus of your desire regardless of gender, rarely do paramours sweat), and large and exceptionally expensive items of machinery used for the excavation of new roads or parking lots. I’m all for dreaming with very disparate subject matter. Why dream generically.

Heartthrob obviously doesn’t mire himself in genre. For proof of this go straight to the track “Signs,” and revel in his mechanistic majesty, constructed from Detroit chunk, Teutonic tone and Alpha Centaurian ambience (or ambulance if you prefer…siren-like sounds). The rest of the album is of the same high quality and the production value is outstanding in its own field, or outstanding in your own field, and maybe at some point you’ll be out standing in somebody else’s own field while "Signs," — or any other track on this record — is driving through a huge sound-system to a gang of people. Does raving still exist? I hope so, ‘cos this is a damn good record to rave to, or rave about even. This here is good techno, no two ways about it.

Orr