[Harbour City Sorrow]

“True house music” — the term rolls off the tongue these days, and many would have you believe it cannot be made without 707 handclaps and an MPC full of Gil Scott Heron quotes. Not only does this kind of thinking limit one’s creativity, it ignores a very fruitful decade of house made in (and with) the digital age. Consider, however, electro: it’s hard to even conceive of the sound without the 808, and since the Drexcyen storms it’s remained relatively unchanged. It’s an older genre than house or techno, and perhaps its age reinforces certain sonic restrictions; if anything were to fall under Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I [hear] it” maxim, electro would be it.

E.R.P. is the electro alias of Convextion (Texas’ Gerard Hanson), and he’s been reliably putting out the good stuff for over 10 years. Lunar Ruins comes to us courtesy of Rotterdam’s Harbour City Sorrow, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) has close ties with Clone. And in case there were any doubt left that this is an electro record, the main stars of the title track are the 808 and SH-101. It’s a wonderful slice of moody Detroit goodness: an insistent, kinetic bass line cuts through shimmering minor-key pads and a sea of 808 toms, while “Into The Distance” reaches ecstatic heights and “Mimosa Canopy” mines the aquatic Drexcyen depths, resembling some of their more stoned, outré moments. Lunar Ruins doesn’t move electro far from where it’s been moored for the past 15 years, but then it doesn’t need to. Sounds phase in and out of popularity, and few more so than electro, which seems to be creeping into everything at the moment. But a handful of figures like E.R.P. stay true to this sound through thick and thin, and it’s our loss if we let gems like “Lunar Ruins” pass us by.