In an ever saturated market of music it takes quite the talent to make you sit up and take notice – Villain‘s album for London based digital imprint Singularity Recordings does just that.

This is just wall to wall stunning. Deep, hard and focused. For music made in the sunshine of California it couldn’t be deeper, darker and further from the shining Golden State. Broken techno deftly programmed. The production level on Escapade, is, quite simply, as good as they come.

From the slow evolving grind of The Plan, into the industrialised sub of Materials, to the bleak and captivating Stakeout; with a sonic footprint that you might find on the darkest of Raster-Noton’s output. An album chillingly precise and yet not rigid; with a deep respect of spacial awareness in his tracks the mysterious Villain has produced an essential piece of Darkfloor electronics.

Escapade isn’t just one facet of techno either; where a producer finds and nails that one style, no, Villain has an album that flows as one cohesive piece but also takes the individual tracks into different headspaces as an album should and so many rarely seem to these days. Take the dubbed out shimmering groove of In Motion up against the acid laden big synth, verging on epic title track Escapade, into the more experimental and exploratory journeys of Subterfuge and Leave No Trace; a resonating growling shard of techno that closes the 9 piece 1 hour collection all too soon.

Singularity have become one in my opinion of the essential techno imprints operating at the moment. Delivering dancefloor and beyond sound to an exquisite level of production, detail and underlining force. They are not afraid to push the definition of techno forward either. Available now.

GRAB

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Villain – Intro
Villain – The Plan
Villain – Materials
Villain – Stakeout
Villain – In Motion
Villain – Escapade
Villain – Subterfuge
Villain – Safe House
Villain – Leave No Trace
SIN 016