[Vidab Records]

Wouldbenice, or if you prefer, Andre Goc, from Berlin, appears for the second time on the year-old Vidab imprint with the three-track “Backlash” 12″. Though it’s still young, Vidab has been making a splash. With a spiritual home at the Golden Gate Club and label nights at Panoramabar, Vidab would seem to earn plenty of cool points based on pedigree. Wouldbenice has been has been playing live shows since 2004, but “Backlash” is only his second release. Based on the high degree of polish on display in these three tracks, it’s not difficult to imagine that Goc has been producing for a while. And “Hallschlag”, the fantastically controlled A Side, persuades that Vidab has earned its cachet.

“Hallschlag” has all of the devilish accomplishment of any of the techno being made at Berghain. While it lacks the thoroughbred hauteur of a Marcel Dettmann record, there is a silvery smoothness to the sound design. “Hallschlag”‘s pounding percussive array doesn’t over-rely on reverberation, and this fact probably means that it would make a functional addition to many a techno set beyond the confines of the Berghain. Unfortunately, neither of the tracks on the flip do the same nice job of combining techno steam engines with house-ish palatability. Instead, “Dschelada” is bassey and tangled, ultimately collapsing under its own weight. “Create A New Self” is a pleasant and very stripped down ditty that exhorts you (pitched down style) to “exist on a higher plane…get out of this culture” and such. It has a restrained logic about it as a track, but it will probably take a little more to convince that talk of “…a higher vibration” is not a gimmick but rather a means to get there.