With a name like Binary Algorithms, you might expect the Colombian artist to make pitch-black techno that sounds like sheet metal wobbling in a freeway underpass. But Andrés Ávila’s approach to dance music is bold and saturated, with drums and synths blown up into big, skeuomorphic shapes. Ávila’s records have an ambitious conceptual bent to match their sounds. Previous EPs have been themed around René Descartes’ thought applied to a “cyber-network environment,” or a Drexciya-referencing underwater civilization called Tunja from the year 2499, accompanied by political screeds about the whitewashing of electronic music or the moral quandaries of AI. On Reminiscencias, his debut album, Ávila looks away from sci-fi and toward his own life and upbringing in Colombia, writing techno tracks so big (and big-hearted) that it feels like you could reach out and touch them.
Reminiscencias has an epic sweep, layering heart-tugging melodies with the rumbling sounds of traffic and urban life. Ávila is something of a sound design prodigy. In his hands, synths can sound like Hollywood strings (“Cenizas”), and arp notes wobble and glow like lightbulb filaments (“Something to Fight For”). Polished drums tap out funky, broken patterns with just the right amount of force, enough to rattle windows without the bass blotting everything else out. There’s an inviting quality to this production style, where everything feels like it exists in a discrete, three-dimensional space.
These tendencies lend Reminiscencias a larger-than-life quality that channels ’00s thriller scores crossed with early-’10s techno, recalling a time when Berghain still drove (or at least lorded over) underground nightlife culture. It’s easy to imagine “To Resist and Break,” with its foreboding bassline and whip-crack drums, soundtracking a tense pursuit from The Bourne Identity, but there’s also a stirring emotional undercurrent in the vein of E.R.P. or the Exaltics—artists who sneak stately melodies into tracks that are precision engineered for the club. Throughout the LP, dance tracks are broken up by sketches that are a notch above the usual techno album interludes, like “Clamor de Dolor,” which makes me think of a church organist trying to play a Burial tune.
