Stanislav Tolkachev
There Is Almost No God EP

To get here, Tolkachev has spent ten years in virtuous apprenticeship, filled with 12". In a standard pilgrimage from label to label, he traveled from Ukraine to Milan's M_Rec, only to move westward and land at Mord, like a Mordor on the banks of the New Meuse. And like a rough Gagarin, discovering that There is almost no god.

It's a title that captures the idea well, if club techno, with all its infinite nuances, is considered as blind devotion to the god of kick, in compliance with a rigid formality, from production modalities (vinyl extended play as the privileged medium: side A, side B, 2/4 tracks) to structural data. The contemporary clubber, even quite savvy, to avoid calling out the MD bloodhound, doesn't listen to Autechre.
[Experiment by M. Nigagi at my house: fairly savvy clubberz talking to me about "well-made techno: you can tell it's well-made because it changes every ten." They count the beats. They listen a lot to Boston 168 during that time. "Oh, but do you know Autechre instead? They're famous for rave history and stuff. No, okay." I play Flutter, and not from the PC speakers. We listen to Flutter: smiles under the septa and no in time. Flutter ends: "nice intro." Flutter. Nice intro. Just-get-out-of-here.]

From the digital debut, too modestly titled Rudiment, gradually freeing itself from genre constraints to almost no god: I emphasize because Tolkachev, with his latest 12", has not reinvented himself in free-form, he hasn’t gone ambient. But almost.
The journey is as described by the arrangement of the tracks: the purest ambient in layers of synth in Eternal Dawn introduces Landowner and Perforated Spoon, for ten blatantly percussive minutes of low-pedal heavy distortion from clipping, with off-and-on saturation games, balance oscillations, while the tonality is maintained by synthetic bursts closing the beat in Landowner, opening in Perforated Spoon (resulting in a feeling of rhythm in regression and progression). Ten minutes that wouldn't have been out of place at the end of an Exai, as Tolkachev seems to have chosen to arrange similar dark sonic material, with absolute mastery of the language, a well-coded expressiveness with clear signs. Just listen to last year's exhausting - in a good way - triple 12", When You Are Not At Home, which Mord sells in a package with this for $29. But on that record, maybe due to the use of the arpeggiator, a god can still be felt.
Pocket For A Leaky Coin is the turning point, the keystone, and the key to understanding. We realize that the bpm stay right, equal, stationary there: but it's just that snare which sounds both full and empty and sometimes disappears under all-consuming slow distorted synths (and sometimes becomes a glitch or a metal kick of electronics), reminding us that we're still listening to a techno record.

Tolkachev tends to hide what is exhibited in genre techno. He skillfully works with illusion, with the deconstruction of a constant rhythm that thus, under the radar, gives a sense of compactness. While sinking into the noise, dark ambient nightmare of No One Waves Goodbye, the eponymous track adds white noise - it could really be a vacuum cleaner - and distances pedals and rhythms in a subdued outdoor-like reverb, guided by a siren and laser beam synth that seems to show the frantic dance of the lights; and Bleed On Me loops the discourse to the extreme, bringing everything to the forefront until the off-rhythm, reversed (like those who speak in the Lodge) farewell.