If Basic Channel's iconic 1993-1994 run of albums was dub techno's moment of nuclear fission, then the isotope in question was crammed with such a dense range of assorted goodness than we can and should spend all day unpacking the stylistic breadth of its constituent parts as well as its combined impact. Translation: Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus did a
lot in those years, and it's less a case of whittling their down to 'essential' releases as it is of appreciating an enjoyably diverse set of individual merits. That said, as on-board as I am with the Basic Channel releases that doubled down on their new style as a workable template (
Octagon and
Q1.1, both excellent), three albums stand out in particular as world-beating reimaginings of techno that could just about have carried the entire oeuvre by themselves: the original
Phylyps Trak, still unparalleled on the propulsive end of the genre with its heavyweight kick and dense knot of delays, the legendary
Quadrant Dub, a blend of dance music and expansive atmosphere so seamless that it was impossible to tell which side was doing the other more favours, and the duo's most abstract outing and last major statement before they jumped ship to Maurizio,
Radiance.
Radiance is the point where the stabilisers fall off, where the wheels leave the ground entirely, where the
beat – the grounding be-all-and-end-all of techno as an institution! – is no longer the crux of the track, but as an orbital a feature as any given as any dub squiggle or scribble. The two extended cuts "Radiance I" and "Radiance III" follow up on the experimental side of the duo's earlier "Lyot Rmx", adopting a decentralised approach where the track evolves not so much beat-by-beat as effect-by-effect; they operate in a vacuum where
any element of the track can compete for central prominence, developing them so delicately, so sparsely that the upshot is a graceful weave rather than the muddled clutter "Lyot Rmx" momentarily fell into. Willfully disorienting as this is – this thing's spangled delays and successive waves of hiss and crackle wouldn't be half as captivating if they were anything but! – Basic Channel are masterful in how subtly they infuse these three tracks with approachable contours. "Radiance III" offers this in the form of a comparatively sturdy central groove, whereas "Radiance II" takes the opposite approach: perhaps the most gorgeous song the duo ever made, its ambience-first approach so aesthetically rich that one doesn't so much follow its patterns of delay as drift with them; the fact that this is offered to us as a four-minute skit rather than a full-length odyssey is arguably the record's greatest crime. However, the crown jewel of the album is surely "Radiance I" — this track is extraordinary for how it passes its rhythmic centre not only between different layers, but between different rates of delay, from chords to bass and back again, turning an intricate juggling act into a seemingly frictionless wash of overlapping currents. For my money, it's the most complex track Basic Track ever made, and it speaks volumes for
Radiance as a whole that it also lands as one of their most effortlessly immersive pieces.
It took some time for this record's particular legacy to come to fruition: after wrapping up Basic Channel with the comparatively tame
Phylyps Trak II, von Oswald and Ernestus jumped ship to Maurizio and scaled back from this approach, stripping the classic Basic Channel kick/off-beat bass combination down to its robust rhythmic core and testing the limits of how far they alone could support extended tracks. This proved a different kind of experiment that itself yielded astounding results (as per 1995's
M4.5), but it wasn't until the likes of Vladislav Delay and Shinichi Atobe were released on the duo's label Chain Reaction that
Radiance found its true heirs — and if those two artists in themselves are synonymous with a rich pedigree of ambient dub, minimal techno and spellbinding glitch, then perhaps some splinters of some atoms are
particularly worth splitting.
