Album of the Week: Shed, ‘The Traveller’

Album of the Week: Shed, ‘The Traveller’

3 September, 2010 | 3.09AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: eqd, ostgut ton, shed, stp, subsolo, wax

Shed‘s René Pawlowitz reminds me a little of James Murphy’s persona in LCD Soundsystem’s ‘You Wanted a Hit’, with its memorable refrain, “You wanted a hit/ But maybe we don’t do hits.”

True, Shed’s dusky, sedimentary techno couldn’t be further away from LCD’s forceful dance-rock, stylistically speaking. But Pawlowitz shows the same kind of ambivalence about fulfilling populist expectations. In an interview with De:Bug magazine this month, he makes it clear that he’s no great fan of nightclubs or their occasionally lunkheaded patrons—for instance, the clubbers who ask him, in the middle of his set, why he isn’t smiling.

Regardless, the man knows how to make hits. His records as Wax and EQD routinely top Resident Advisor’s monthly DJ charts as well as Beatport’s own lists of most frequently charted tracks. The reason is simple: they’re perfect distillations of techno at its most gracefully functional. Pawlowitz goes so far as to describe them as DJ fodder—tools, essentially. (In German, he actually calls them “DJ-Futter”: literally, pet food for DJs.)

‘The Traveller’, the followup to Shed’s 2008 debut album, ‘Shedding the Past’, is something else entirely.

At 14 tracks but only 47 minutes long, the track lengths make it immediately clear that the DJ isn’t first in his mind: most of the cuts here, even the most overtly “playable” ones, are only three or four minutes long. A cut like ‘Keep Time’, a bouncing breakbeat fantasia at 112 BPM, plays out just long enough to lay out its ideas, and falls silent.

But that doesn’t make the record any less an example of techno at its most essential. Using oddly cut breakbeats, gleaming synthesizers and a good deal of classic mixing-desk voodoo, he explores the dimensions that techno takes on when it’s untethered from the 4/4 kick and set free from obligatory tempos.

If there’s something quintessentially early ‘90s about the album, that’s probably not a coincidence: that was the last time that techno producers routinely roamed beyond conventional tempos and beat structures. Tracks like ‘Atmo – Action’, ‘Mayday’, and ‘Hello Bleep!’ recall Sun Electric, the Black Dog, Luke Slater’s Seventh Plain, or classic R&S sides. His churning, tumbling breakbeats are reminiscent of Baby Ford & Eon’s ‘Dead Eye’, and ‘My R-Class’, the most straightforward thing here, plays out like an autistic interpretation of classic acid.

It’s probably not surprising that Pawlowitz’ breakbeat investigations are heavily informed by dubstep, given his day job at Berlin’s Hardwax record shop, a steadfast supporter of the sound. (Two more Pawlowitz aliases, STP and the Panamax Project, focus more explicitly on dubstep.) ‘The Bot’ asks what happens when you vacuum out the innards of a dubstep track, leaving a brittle exoskeleton rattling at 70 BPM, and ‘No Way!’ and ‘Final Experiment’ dive headlong into the dizzy rhythmic turmoil of “wonky” or “purple” dubstep at its most unhinged.

Rounding the album out are jewel-toned ambient miniatures like ‘STP 2’ and ‘Can’t Feel It’. And in a surprising choice of sequencing, the album’s closing track, ‘Leave Things’, begins as an Oneohtrix Point Never-like study in cosmic arpeggios before blasting off in an explosion of old-school jungle breaks.

Cherry-pick the tracks if you will; even if they’re not made specifically for DJs, there’s plenty here to inspire DJs of many different stripes. (As for the short track lengths: either learn to mix more quickly, or get thee a looping device.) But ‘The Traveller’ really deserves to be heard in its entirety. It’s not often that an album like this comes along: for all the easy talk of DJs taking people on a journey, ‘The Traveler’ is one tour guide worth following.

Shed, ‘The Traveller’ [Ostgut Ton]

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