Moeller’s latest takes the echoey atmospheres from last year’s “Electricity” EP and injects them with some big-room steroidal girth, resulting in muscular late-night dub techno. Besides flushed and sweeping filters, the means to providing the “Big Thrill” in question seems to be a very prominently mixed low end, particularly the bass, a face-slapper rough with grizzly saturation. It’s thunderous bass that yearns to be free, a brown-note floor-rattler so forceful home listeners (who will doubtlessly enjoy “The Big Thrill” there as well) will have to acknowledge they’re missing the full experience imparted in a club. Above the low-end rumble, filters arc and pop in unexpected cadence, and there’s a disorienting whiplash noise that sounds like laser zippers being unfastened at lightning speed. On headphones there are traces of a slightly murky fidelity working in the track’s favor, as if the sounds on display are merely inadequate vessels for its surging energy. This minor imperfection adds to the thrill, giving it an organic liveliness that sometimes falls by the wayside during a quest for absolute aural cleanliness.
Supposedly there’s a “dub” version in the A-2 slot, but its lack of distinction from the A-1 incarnation underlines terminological inconsistencies in the world of electronic music: when do you call it a dub, when it is a mix, a remix, an edit, or a re-edit, etc? Is there an Academie de Techno that can be appealed to here? In this case, the “dub” of “The Big Thrill” has nothing to do with King Tubby or Echocord. The peaks of the original have been sanded down and murky interlude spaces have been extended. The intro relies more on bubbly percolation, and more gaseous effervescence sprayed across the course of things. Greece house producer Lemos turns a proper remix on the flip, screwing and tightening the bolts on Moeller’s big-boned, mac-truck original, producing a more spare, tightly-wound, more housier incarnation. The filtered elements are less chaotically submerged, their delay effects pared down to faster, rubber-band like echoes. It makes one wonder again what the A2 is doing here, as it seems to interrupt the nice balance between the barreling opener and the stripped-down remix, which taken together form a nice pair and an unexpected addition to Moeller’s discography.
