Someone with the status that British techno icon and Ibiza legend Carl Cox has doesn’t necessarily have to release albums. Aside from this being the streaming age, where singles are more lucrative, Cox’s bread and butter are his lauded live sets and residencies. He is, without question, one of the greatest DJs in history. So when a project like Electronic Generations comes around, Cox’s first album in a decade, you can assume that it exists largely as a passion project. “I could be complacent and just stick to what I already do but I can’t do that,” Cox has said of the album, describing it to EDM.com as “a little bit of a window or showcase of what the sound of techno is from today’s point of view, from my point of view, this is my offering.”
Calling Electronic Generations techno per-se might not be quite correct. While most of the tracks on the album pound with a regular time thud, Cox laces these tracks with touches of acid, progressive, and tech house quite prominently. In essence, he weaves together his foremost influences over the years into his idea of contemporary techno, the ‘generations’ in question. The shimmering hi-hats and moments of tension and release on Toys Out Of The Pram is undeniably contemporary tech-house, while Heads Up with its hoover synths and sharp peaks and valleys is rooted in progressive. The latter, though a touch broish, is fun enough, and you can’t help but imagine the impact it might have blasting through the DC10 sound system at 5AM. From Line Lock, Cox experiments with the acerbic synth squiggles of acid, the most on the nose of these being previously released single Speed Trials On Acid. The track remains quite potent here, and is one of the album’s most memorable moments with its breakdown of shrill, electronic shrieks. Deep Space X is possibly the most intriguing piece of the track list. The track sees Cox start off with what promises to be a spacey, minimal techno cut in the vein of Floorplan, before bringing in a distorted kuduro beat atop his four-on-the-floor. It’s an unexpected and playful acknowledgment of dance music’s current direction, and possibly the closest Cox gets to merging “today’s point of view” with his own.
Download and stream Electronic Generations here
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Electronic Generations plays out like a peak time DJ set, moving from harder hitting tech and progressive to the psychedelia of Cox’s acid tracks, eventually arriving at the minimal tech and deep progressive house of Apollo Beings and See The Sun. Cox’s strengths lie in his ability to formulate and communicate a sonic journey, more so than they do in producing a singular track. Arguably, the music on Electronic Generations is far from the cutting edge of techno today. In fact, most of the tracks feel like broad sketches of the kind of tracks Cox might play over the course of one of his sets. That might be the intention here though, to capture the energy of the sort of journey Cox might craft by weaving his music with other people’s. Though without the support of the latter, the album feels more like an outline of a whole. The album ends with a reprise of its opening, the title track Electronic Generations, here stripped of percussion and distilled into a sequence of undulating arpeggios that intend to greet the rising sun. In this sense, Electronic Generations is brilliantly sequenced. From start to finish, the album is expertly curated to sweep you up on wherever it’s headed, and if anything speaks toward Cox’s unmatched genius as a selector.
Listen to Deep Space X from Electronic Generations below.
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