SNTS

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Toward the end of the 2010s, the techno scene experienced a wear and tear of the minimal/industrial coordinates on which it had built the previous era. While the revival found its main catalysts in Berlin clubs, particularly Berghain and Tresor, with the arrival of the new decade, there was a gradual abandonment of the dark and minimalist clichés, those that had their progenitors in Plastikman, Basic Channel, and certain faded post-punk reminiscences. After that era ended, producers began to explore new paths: some pushed the accelerator, reintroducing the hammering beat of Zeroes-era hardgroove techno, while others introduced melodic elements.

SNTS belongs to a third stream, one that has exaggerated every detail of production, immersing it in cybernetic, suffocating, and cinematic scenarios, achieving a result that retains only the repetition of minimalism while emphasizing its material brutality, oppressively and viscerally industrial, as if a neurofunk blade were slashing the techno beat from schranz drifts. The album is built on ultra-processed, mechanical kicks, around which chaotic noises and distorted arpeggios swarm. There are some interesting moments ("Breathe" is a hellish surrogate of Shxcxchcxsh) but more as fragments of a discourse that rarely finds a completed form.

Far from the glory of the early EPs on Horizontal Ground, "Stigmata" is a work as impetuous and brutal as it is harmless, an album that seems to scream "look how ruthless I am!" in a world that has little need for this kind of ferocity.

01/03/2025