Eddie Dark
Touch My Elektroniks
Inner Ear
We’ve made mention of the “time is a flat circle” experience of watching dark techno producers convergently evolve towards a sound effectively laid out decades earlier by rhythmic noise acts many times, but have also observed some hints of modern artists encroaching upon aggrotech territory. The increasingly harsh direction taken by Greece’s Eddie Dark on new LP Touch My Elektroniks is almost entirely separate from the electro-darkwave sound he began with, and will likely cause some flashbacks in listeners old enough to remember the days when clubs were awash with cyberfalls and gasmasks.
Lead single “Ο ΑΚΑΛΕΣΤΟΣ” serves as a strong statement of Dark’s newfound aesthetic, with a straightforward EBM-styled bassline decked out with divebomb detuned pads, rapid-fire arpeggiation, and acidic vocals. Catchy and club-ready, one can hear traces of a number of ways in which rave sounds old and new have been brought into industrial clubs over the last decade, but taken in total it ends up ticking most of the boxes of classic aggrotech. “ΑΠΛΑ ΜΙΑ ΝΤΡΟΠΗ” is a similarly speedy cyber-flavoured cut, with some parallels to the move overt ProNoize homage plied by Düsseldorf’s Skren.
Thankfully, toxic neon nostalgia isn’t the only mood Dark touches upon here, and his vocal charisma and instinct for arrangements get a chance to move about. The synthpunky punch of the title track, along with the glitchy breaks of “I WANNA KILL YOUR VIBE” connote the spirit if not the literal sounds of electronic Teutonic madmen like Alec Empire and Felix Kubin. Some traces of Dark’s original darkwave style can still be sussed out in “ΑΝΤΙΧΡΙΣΤΕΣ ΜΕΡΕΣ” and “ΤΟ ΜΟΝΟ ΠΟΥ ΖΗΤΑΩ”, albeit pinched and distorted beyond their original moody cast.
As mentioned above, Dark isn’t the first younger producer to be arriving at the same caustic wellspring as earlier acts. France’s ROÜGE came to a similar, albeit instrumental, delivery via her background in techno. More than questions of origin or intention, though, what’s of most interest when a newer artist alights on an established platform is how they use it to showcase their own work and personality. In this case, Dark’s yen for excess and nudge-nudge sense of humour seems well-suited to Touch My Elektroniks‘s aggressive register.
