Chevel: Blurse

Chevel is a young European producer with fashionable friends—he's had a long working relationship with fellow Italian Lucy—good DJ bookings, his own label (Enklav), and a fair amount of hype. He also has something a lot of precocious upstarts don't: a deep and evolving catalog, counting 15 singles and now three albums to his name. His latest, Blurse—out on Lucy's excellent Stroboscopic Artefacts label—is a bold, confident step away from the dance floor material he's been honing and into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design.

Blurse opens the way a lot of techno records do—with a grimy, compressed kick drum—and that's about the last time Blurse proceeds the way a lot of techno records do. The second kick arrives nearly a second later, an eternity on a dance floor. By the 90-second mark Chevel seems to have lost interest in the kick drum entirely, taking a mid-track siesta with the swirling harmonics and buzzing synths/insects. The drums come back—they almost always do—but these kind of aberrant structures define Blurse, which sees Chevel continually chart his way to abstraction and back again.

Blurse, then, is kin to a certain strand of hypnotic, percussion-heavy dance music that sits at the edges of house and techno, the kind only touched by adventurous and skilled DJs. There are elements of Pearson Sound's coptering drums, of Objekt's cryptic architecture, even of the spacey suspensions of early dubstep masters such as Loefah. And, impressively, Chevel never veers too far into the avant-garde; Blurse, with its hard gray surfaces and dubby quivers, is always identifiable as techno in some mutated form. Chevel is walking a tightrope here, maintaining structure while unmooring most of a track's conventional building blocks.

There's fun to be had in the details, too. The end of "Watery Drumming" features wildly rippling echoes as what sounds like an actual clock keeps time. "Down and Out" consists mostly of short, pitched percussion sounds and little stabs of an electric piano; skipping around the track with your mouse you're as likely to find utter silence as anything. The gorgeous "Loop #33" sees gooey, molten synths rise from beneath the cracks in the percussion.

Concrete melodies are a little thin on the ground, so Blurse can sound homogenous. The record sometimes lacks the dynamism of works by the aforementioned artists, at times bordering on ascetic and clinical. But this style, which results in a lot of short, compact tracks, lends itself well to the album format. Which might be the point: Chevel has released two EPs and a 10-inch this year, all of them showcasing his steady progression but aimed more squarely at the dance floor. Blurse has the precision of a practiced producer and mischievousness of a rogue. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it.