3 out of 5

Label: Shitkatapult

Produced by: Apparat

Minimalist to a fault, Apparat’s debut builds upon a small cache of clips and blips to make for some impressively involving tracks and moments, but ends up maintaining a hardline against heavy beats to the extent that the majority of the album never raises above a certain bar.

The title track opener mostly sets the tone with some lightly distorted clipping noises, a robotic beep, and some more tuneful synths – something you’d expect from Analord-era AFX releases, although with an interesting tightness to the experimentation.  You can’t exactly say where the tracks on Multifunktion are going to go, but they definitely seem to follow a set design, which, again, is a plus/minus: the plus is when the basics of that opener flourish into the dark warmth of 7.5t, which adds just enough to the introduced elements to totally change the game; the minus is when a track like Error404 pulls a similar trick compared to its moody precedent, Fuckedup, and then hangs around brandishing its noises for about the same amount of time as the other tracks.  The compositions are impressively layered considering the small range of effects that are implemented, but it’s like Apparat (Sascha Ring) got so obsessed with exploring different variations on this theme that he neglected to consider how that experiment would work at album length.  Thankfully the beats are pleasant, and those moments that emerge – the boastfulness of Multifocus, for example – are grabbing, they just end up settling back into that same pleasantry soon enough before the album plays itself out with Forward/Backward.

Certainly a promising debut, and evidence of clear skills with the tech and arrangements, just lacking the scope needed to bump it up a notch.