[Turbo]

Terence Fixmer’s work on Electric Deluxe saw him run into the open arms of techno as the genre moved simultaneously to embrace the dark, industrial influences that have always dominated the French producer’s music. But Fixmer’s first solo release since then, on Tiga’s versatile Turbo Recordings, sees him stalking back into the EBM shadows, away from the Plastikman references and fluid grooves. Instead, “The Night” bubbles up like black bile, its bass line and melody disintegrating into grubby, distorted rattles. Those familiar time-shifting chord thrusts find their way in halfway through, but they’re rough and rusty, turning the track into a wonderful mutant hybrid of his older work and his smoother EDLX material. M_nus man Marc Houle valiantly attempts to bring it full-bore back into techno territory and unfortunately misses a turn somewhere along the way, his percussive-oriented remix putting too much stock into detuned chord stabs and a lifelessly marching snare pattern, and ends up feeling limp next to the original.

The two B-sides are further Fixmer originals, and promising ones at that: “Kiss Of Death” is chunky, nasty bleep techno that only gets meaner in its spelunking. The sonorous off-key chime gets increasingly louder and closer to maddening by the end, turning the hints at horror in Fixmer’s techno to literal accents. Finally, “Deeper In The Night” is a more EDLX-friendly makeover, disassembling the lumbering heart of “The Night” and thickening the paranoid scatter into bulbous, reverberant bundles of synth. As a stopgap and a possible hint towards future directions, it would seem like Fixmer is only continuing his streak of creativity, finding new ways to seamlessly incorporate his unique background into an equally original vision of techno.