There's No Hard Techno Scene in Lithuania. 0000kintsugi Built One Anyway

Lithuania doesn't really have a hard techno scene. There's no circuit to come up through, no local label ecosystem, nobody two doors down running a night you can play. Which makes what 0000kintsugi has done in the four years harder to explain than it looks on paper: inside his first year of releasing music, Sara Landry, Rebekah and Vandex have all played his tracks, some of it in Boiler Room sets. All of it earned remotely, from a country with almost no infrastructure behind it.

Lose Control is his debut EP for SYSTOLIC and it doesn't sound like a debut. Four tracks built on the same idea he calls cinematic schranz: hard and driving, but with something behind the kick that most of the genre strips out. It's the difference between a track that hits you and a track that puts you somewhere. He describes wanting it to sound like it belongs in an action film or a video game, and the reference makes sense once you hear how much room he leaves for atmosphere underneath the pressure.

The title isn't about losing your mind on a dancefloor, or not only that. "The name comes from the idea that sometimes losing control takes you further than you ever thought possible," he says. "Even when you think you've lost it all, life always has something good in store."

That's a strange thing to build a schranz record around, and it's the most interesting thing about the EP. Where the genre usually deals in aggression, 0000kintsugi is writing about repair. He fell for techno at his first rave and has been chasing that specific feeling since — the one where the room locks in and everything else drops away.

"When the DJ is dropping banger after banger and the whole room is locked into that energy, life feels beautiful," he says. "A lot of people heal on the dancefloor. With these tracks I wanted to recreate that feeling and tell the listener: I see you, now dance out all the bad."

"Drop And Hide" closes it and it's the heaviest thing here. Whatever restraint he shows on the first three tracks, he drops it entirely on the last one.

Get it on Beatport