BIOKINETICS by PORTER RICKS

Rush Hour Store Record of the week W30:

‘Biokinetics’ is the monumental debut album by seminal German dub techno innovators Porter Ricks, the legendary duo consisting of Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig.

Originally released as a CD-only project in 1996, the album is centered around the pioneering duo’s first three singles for Basic Channel subsidiary Chain Reaction (also home to illustrious contemporaries like Monolake, Fluxion and Vainqueur) and still stands as one of the defining moments in dub techno twenty-five years later.

Merely calling this groundbreaking masterpiece a dub techno album doesn’t do it justice, though. Köner and Mellwig take the fabric of the aesthetic spun by Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus and morph it into something else completely - a thick, dense and ridiculously detailed amalgam of pulsating techno, fully saturated ambient soundscapes that somehow sound entirely organic and mind-altering psychedelic drone.

Twenty-five years on ‘Biokinetics’ (a term that refers both to the study of the metabolism and transport of drugs through the body and the study of physical motions) still stands as one of the most important achievements in electronic music and certainly hasn’t lost any of its awesome power. Essential listening for everyone even remotely interested in modern electronic music (RO).

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A classic of dub-techno, and of techno at large, Biokinetics was the first CD released on Chain Reaction, the Basic Channel sub-label that also nurtured the likes of Scion, Vladislav Delay, Monolake and Various Artists (T++). The disc featured five selected tracks taken from Porter Ricks’ three 12″s for the label, plus three exclusives.

Following on the 2012 2xLP reissue on Type,  Mille Plateaux makes this classic piece of techno available once more -  Check!