[Macro]

Three or four dudes hunched over laptops, MIDI controllers, and a tangle of cable — is that a band? With relatively few exceptions (the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Theo Parrish’s Rotating Assembly, and Innerzone Orchestra all come to mind), that’s about as close as you’ll get to one in club music. Plenty of red-blooded guitar wielders have owed a massive debt to house and techno; some, like Animal Collective or Hot Chip, owed one massive enough to make us reconsider the genre to which we’d had them pegged. But has a power trio — the “rock band” in its most elemental form — ever tried to straight-up play techno? On their 12″ debut for eternally unpredictable Macro imprint, Elektro Guzzi do just that, and they claim to do it without overdubs, loops, or laptops.

There’s no question that Elektro Guzzi (featuring guitarist Bernhard Hammer, bassist Jakob Schneidewind, and drummer Bernhard Breuer) has passed the threshold of truly embodying — and not just filching from — the techno aesthetic. “Hexenschuss” and “Elastic Bulb” both rise and fall, tense up and release, and groove just like every electronically produced side in your record bag. The band’s trick (their co-producer and mixer, Cheap Records honcho Patrick Pulsinger, surely deserves some credit for this) is harnessing the unpredictable variations in organically generated drum hits and guitar stabs to lend their techno an exciting layer of sonic uncertainty. “Hexenschuss” proves especially adept at this trick. Once Breuer’s kick drum settles into a 4/4 thump, his partners ramp up the tension, putting their instruments in the service of atmosphere rather than melody or rock-out. While it’s undeniably impressive how well the trio holds together during the track’s two big breakdowns, their choice of gear becomes only the faintest of background chatter; as a subtle techno burner, “Hexenschuss” transcends any inherent gimmick. A good deal longer and less interesting than the A-side, “Elastic Bulb” shows that Ableton Live isn’t the only cause of loopy formlessness in tech-house these days. But their full-band grasp of the sort of tech-house weirdness their label boss Stefan Goldmann made his early career out of — not to mention the detailed sounds only perfectly miked live instruments can leave on tape — renders it a worthy listen regardless. Like a Pipecock rant taken to ultra-extremes, Elektro Guzzi proves that analog really might have more to offer than your average bedroom producers’ ones and zeros. I’m not sure this power techno trio concept will catch on like comic book movies or nü-deep house, but let’s hope these Elektro Guzzi boys maintain their chops.