3 out of 5

Label: Unknown to the Unknown

Produced by: Bogdan Raczynski

Look, eh… I almost threw this thing out the proverbial window upon first spin. I acknowledge that that’s my fault, for having expectations of what I thought electro cut-up, BPM madman Bogdan Raczynski’s return (after 10+ years) should sound like, and furthermore… probably not quite being able to define what those expectations were. So when ‘Debt’ sounded like – from this kneejerking-ready POV – a 90s club house mix, with some amped up drums that mimic an old school Bogdan sound, i.e. pretty bog-standard techno that someone based around a looped Rephlex sample, well, that description alone tells the story: my knees jerked, I wrinkled my nose in frustrated disgust, and began mentally preparing a harsh review.

Closer ‘Net Assets’ – yes, all of these songs have financially-themed names, which one could take as classic Bogdan playfulness, or you could let it annoy you, if you’re already annoyed – offered up some hope, though. Its clipped, off-time percussion and some distant vocal effects call to mind the out-of-box thinking of past brilliance, but warped to a present day, when maybe… the goal was to make a club record with those same tools. This gave some shape for how to listen to the Debt EP, and I delicately hit “play” again, with that in mind.

That (mostly) did the trick.

Openers ‘Arrears’ and ‘Collection Agency’ are quite brilliant in this regard: if you minus out the drill n’ bass base layer of Alright! Bogdan, and swap in a steady, fuzzed up beat, then reapply the cut-and-paste glitz to the other synth layers, and that a bit more mathematically – purposefully adding and removing, adding and removing, sliding different pieces into place – you can follow the connections from there to here. Little touches of those albums are buried in that mix, whether in how Bogdan breaks up the beat on occasion, or, as with ‘Net,’ some particular sounds are just familiar.

But this is admittedly kind of buried. If we want to extend the name to some analysis, one could reckon this is Bogdan’s way of working off the “debt” of my (our?) expectations, in a kind of workman fashion that gives a little back, then shows how its been reinvesting. Unfortunately, the maybe-accurately-named 8-minute Compound Interest rather kills the deal, even though it tries for an interesting exercise in minimalism: a bare beat, and one other layer, occasionally changing what that layer is. The album’s generally harsh, acidic sound is especially icy here, and calls to mind Analogue Bubblebath 4, but without that set’s focus. It’s really just… too effing long, and offers little to show for it, even using up something of a climax to just circle back around and keep doing the same thing. And especially when the same approach is better utilized in the more streamlined followup, Lien, which has the opposite problem of cutting out before it gets very far, but rather that than become grating with excessive runtime.

So: many words. In less words: if I’m being honest, stood on its own, I think this is a good club record, or maybe something for an intense workout, but it makes you work to appreciate its more unique aspects, and almost fights back against that effort with that 8-minute song. As a Bogdan EP, it’s… interesting, but doesn’t yet become part of my playlist, until / unless this era of the artist gets more context with further releases.