The Analog Session is made up of Alexander Robotnick and Ludus Pinsky, a pair of absolute legends from Italy, best known from their Slavic-soundalike aliases and careers built upon wild creativity, unexpected success and archives of music so vast that no one could hope to catalog it all. As The Analog Session, the music itself becomes a viral replicant — Robotnick and Pinsky come up with a sequence, a loop, a pattern and through vibing together build up a track around it.
But unlike a lot on the “experimental” side of electronic music, there’s also no doubt that The Analog Session is supposed to be fun: two guys jamming together and seeing what dope music comes out of it. Before they did this at festivals and in nightclubs they did this in someone’s garage, and still do, and the implicit message here is that so could you.
The results are unpredictable and sometimes brilliant — I had the slamming Analog Session track “Ascension” as my alarm for more than a year and woke up startled if not invigorated almost every day. It’s also about as un-commercial as contemporary techno can get. Their new Seven Textures of Sound LP leads off with a track called “Extended Chord,” and it’s as much a description as it is a title. Even some of the most bad ass DJs are scrambling to cope with listeners’ attention spans that streaming services like Spotify have shorn down to the nub, altering their arrangements to cram choruses into the first 20 seconds of any track before listeners shuffle off in search of the next endorphin hit. “Extended Chord” on the other hand is trapped in stasis. It’s nearly 10 minutes long, and for the first four minutes it’s nearly immobile. It’s like staring into an opal. From this primordial sludge a melody, a pulse of percussion and then a groove emerge, feeling fresh and unlike anything that has come before it. Moments like these are beautiful; they can only come from electronic music and a sensibility that may be heading toward extinction but was never in ample supply to begin with.
And that’s a feeling that pervades The Analog Session — like we’re hearing the last great flowering of techno live acts, the first and best of which were composed of multiple talented individuals collaborating together in the spirit of a band. I don’t know if I will see The Analog Sessions live, and at this point in history it’s not a guarantee anyone will. But this is music that belongs to them only. We may play it but we’re just borrowing it.
The Analog Session: Seven Textures of Sound LP (Hot Elephant Music / Digital / November 2021)
1. The Analog Session: Extended Chord (9:20)
2. The Analog Session: Analog Heroes (5:58)
3. The Analog Session: Two Arpeggios (8:59)
4. The Analog Session: RU-more 130 (7:39)
5. The Analog Session: Liquid reflections (8:54)
6. The Analog Session: Tech Obsession (9:27)
7. The Analog Session: Broken Song (6:49)
Disclosure Statement: This record was submitted as a promo by EPM.