Charles McCloud Duff’s musical career under various acronyms has flirted with all things four on the floor. His debut LP as Matrixxman, Homesick, has however confidently pinpointed his style, taking the Detroit school as a springboard from which to explore various themes one might think were already well-trodden paths by techno producers: artificial intelligence, industry, dystopia and technology.

The tracks themselves are superb. Heavily percussive TR-909 lines, circular looping melodies and acid leads are staples, all used to accentuate the recurrent motifs. The bassline in ‘Red Light District’ is a fluttering binary, the high-tempo acid shots of ‘Network Failure’ sound like error notifications and the factory floor drums of ‘Packard Plant’ hit the listener over the head with this reference to industrial Detroit. Shuffled percussive grooves throughout put a touch of human in the machine. Yet the record excels where it departs from the norm, as in ‘Annika’s Theme’; a serene and beautifully melodic oasis sandwiched between hard-hitting and club-ready ‘Opium Den’ and ‘HMU’. Its synthscape, drawn primarily from the Roland D-50, D-110 and the Yamaha DX21, would not be out of place on a 1980s film soundtrack.

Honestly, few of the tracks would sound amiss if they had been released 20 years earlier. This is not necessarily a fault – the record’s title, ‘Homesick’, clearly alludes to the past. The aesthetic is a sort of retro-futurism, a brutalist vision of modernity from the perspective of a late-80s or early-90s American city. The selective hardware use shows how these synthesizers and drum machines now serve as markers for “classic” science-fiction. This sentiment is underscored by the allusions to H.P. Lovecraft in the minimalist 9-minute opener ‘Necronomicon’, and the preoccupation with artificial intelligence, intergalactic flight and industrial decline, concerns as pressing now as they were 30 years previously. This potentially muddled sense of time gives us something sounding between Blade Runner, Robert Hood and Jeff Mills, set somewhere between Detroit and Chicago. Nevertheless, Homesick is an excellent record with its own sound, well worth a listen for anyone wanting something with a little more depth than your typical dancefloor tool techno.

Alexander Peel