[Honest Jon’s Records]

I like and respect Torsten Pröfrock plenty, but I must admit: for the last half-decade that he’s spent slowly building his discography as T++, I’ve never been able to fully sink my teeth into his music. Fusing everything Moritz Von Oswald’s ever touched with the intensity of U.K. hardcore and the studiousness of IDM, Pröfrock brought a lot of my interests under one roof on his records as Erosion and myriad remixes, but I always felt strangely removed from the results, like they were presented from behind a thick wall of glass. With T++, techno and bass and even Wire-devouring experimental music heads could find plenty of beats, but I for one could have done with a smidge less science.

On Wireless, purportedly Pröfrock’s final T++ collection, the producer — long recalling a chemist or perhaps nuclear physicist — seems to have moved his operation to a biology lab, if not a roadside barbecue pit. While most T++ remixes have sought to expand on a producer’s implied techniness to the point that they boil over with it, this set — reworkings of 78-rpm recordings unearthed by Honest Jon’s of East African ndingidi (single string fiddle) player Ssekinomu — places T++ and his source material on a long, saucy simmer. Talking about any of these four sides individually seems almost futile: “Cropped,” “Anyi,” “Voice No Bodies,” and “Dig” all similarly pit those familiar ping-ponging rhythms and grinding sonics with a dissonant sultriness that’s been missing not just from T++ but from so much of what toes the line between techno and dubstep.

Ever since Villalobos let punchy Balkan horns ride over drums for half an hour on Fizheuer Zieheuer in 2006, world music has been a jumping-off point for so much house and techno; too often, producers seem to have done little more than smooth out their source material in Ableton and slap it over a Cadenza preset. But these samples sound like they melded with Pröfrock’s studio magic through fermentation, or like they share flesh and a heartbeat; it’s next to impossible to ferret out where Ssekinomu ends and T++ begins. Sinister in mood but balled up in enough loamy warmth to be approachable, Wireless finds Pröfrock simultaneously transitioning as an artist and making the most original and distinctive music of his career. I never thought I’d say this about a T++ release, but here it is: you’ll want to get your hands dirty.