As Shifted matures, his techno flows more fluidly and luxuriously: it doesn’t take an expert to tell there’s a difference between his booming remix of Furesshu’s “Lucid” on Project Squared and last year’s smoother “Reach” on Syndrome Z. Fellow UK techno producer Sigha opens up his Our Circula Sound imprint for its first non-Sigha release, and Shifted provides his most expansive, thoughtful tracks yet for the fledgling label. If Shifted’s early work brought to mind the most polarizing ends of the early Ostgut Ton catalog, then his newest courses in foreboding ripples like the best of Sandwell District.
“Telic” is one of those effortlessly velvety techno tracks, where the cognitive dissonance between elements moving at different speeds turns the entire thing into a pleasant smear of motion: even the relatively abrasive chords that pop up halfway through get lost in the blur. A little less reliant on atmospherics, “Solus” is more the pitch-black kind of techno we’re used to from Shifted, subtly building tiny additions to its framework as drones whir in the background: it’s the particulate, bubbling counterpart to the silky tapestry of “Telic.” The EP is rounded off with two minutes of fascinating ambience, the deeply throbbing drone of “Image//Channel” like some sub-aquatic vision of Blackest Ever Black stuck on the ocean floor. Like the two more functional tracks here it paints Shifted more and more as a producer with potential for impeccable sound design; and if his 2012 is going to be as good as this EP, we might not have to treat him like a rookie much longer.
