Dub techno runs in Brendon Moeller’s veins. For over 20 years, the South African artist has been one of the genre’s true workhorses, building up an intimidating discography under names like Echologist and Beat Pharmacy and applying the style’s pearlescent, pulsating aesthetic to a range of frameworks. (Case in point: One of his most powerful albums actually has no kick drums at all.) In recent years, Moeller’s music has sped up considerably, ratcheting up from 120 BPM house and techno rhythms to the 170 BPM thrust of drum’n’bass. He found a new identity in that tempo, divorced from the occasional baggage and sameyness that discouraged him early in his career. On Shadow Language, Moeller sounds like no one but himself, making some of the best and most creative dance music of his career.
Shadow Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s Moeller’s second album for Samurai Music, a Berlin-based label that pioneered a fusion of drum’n’bass and techno in the 2010s. The music’s greatest feat was to sound like both tempos at once, playing tricks on the senses and blowing up the stiff structures of drum’n’bass into more open-ended and immersive music. Today, plenty of techno artists and DJs ratchet the pace up to 170, often through halftime trickery or by gradually speeding up the beat so dancers don’t even realize they’re listening to drum’n’bass.
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Moeller takes a different approach. His first experiments at 170 BPM took the form of ambient music, a new way to frame his signature melodies and pads removed from the 4/4 thump of techno and house. Moeller works with the 170 BPM framework to not only add elements to his music, but also to take them away. It’s the old Miles Davis quote about the notes that you don’t play, but this time, it’s drums.
Shadow Language emphasizes atmosphere over rhythm, with structures carefully built up around soft, billowing textures. The broken, intermittent beats on “Control Mechanism” and “Frozen Silence” frame sounds that ricochet, coil, and zoom across the stereo spectrum. Here, he channels dub techno’s penchant for delay and decay into globs of synth that feel unstable and unpredictable—still slate gray and metallic, but inhabiting a whole new universe of texture.
When the drums are the focal point, they’re similarly vivid, ranging from spongy to diamond-hard and usually surrounded by a bass so omnipresent it feels like tectonic plates are moving underneath you. The rhythms stretch from propulsive—the smooth kick and snare interplay on “Impermanence” makes me think of a game of air hockey—to almost suffocating. “War Ghost” is the apotheosis of Moeller’s dub-techno-drum’n’bass fusion, with a drum pattern that slips between your fingers: Is it fluttering? Is it pounding? Is it going forwards or backwards? The track plays around with your perceptions, but it also absolutely bangs, with synth leads as abrasive as pumice stones roughing up Moeller’s usual crystalline synths. It’s like watching the apocalypse, if doomsday were accompanied by a beautiful sunset.
These peaks of intensity come alongside friendlier moments, like the dub techno strut of “Driftform,” or the spacious, sculpted air of “Rearranged Reality.” Moeller’s music has always balanced beauty with foreboding—dub techno is nothing if not a melodramatic genre—but his newfound rhythmic restraint and beat wizardry feel like a step in a different direction. Rooted in two dance music genres notorious for being strict and formulaic but not beholden to their constraints, Shadow Language breaks down their constituent parts and makes new shapes with them: freeform, vibrant, and alive with potential.
