Eye of a Storm
Double électronique
Archaea EP - Maelstrom (2020, Mechatronica) Though it's true things had developed in this part of the world at a slower pace; France is something of a force to offer these kinds of releases where the music is so genuinely pure, as mentioned in the previous review. On Archaea EP, we now hear the flip-side, where we are reminded of the beginnings of techno in the 1980s, when disco was exploited into being declared as not a cool thing for a period of time.
Joan-Mael Péneau has been active since the very late 1990s, coming into the fray when big-beat was ironically pioneering. He's the co-founder of the label, RAAR and has released tracks that don't seem to capitalize off of the four by four template. Those releases have a similar attack, but are much warmer than Michel Amato's productions. However, Archaea EP is a close-cousin turbine of French electricity, 90% of it dark-wave-ish, EBM inspired electro. The remainder of the EP closes out with the soothing ambient piece, Sdzet Drops, sounding a kin to the earlier 1990s of IDM experimentation.
