Spectreview: Skee Mask – Pool

Released: May 7, 2021

Techno
(Ambient)
(Breakbeat)

-LIGHT CORAL-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

Any individual track pulled from Skee Mask’s brilliant 2018 album Compro, when they’re not striking you for their engaging compositions, will remind you of a handful of other dazzling techno acts. Yet it’s the effect of them all side-by-side, told like a story, that the anonymous German producer is preternaturally talented at. Skee Mask is just one of those artists capable of fusing ambient and breakbeat and forming a togography in time’s bend: or, in the words of Björk, an “emotional landscape.”

Pool, a surprise-released follow-up to Compro, is immediately less engaging than its predecessor. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t take off in as exquisite a fashion (sanative opener “Nvivo,” by comparison, starts in media res), or it might be because many of its tracks lean into the kinds of level ambience that swallowed Compro’s middle section. But the record’s potential status as a grower belies the sheer quality of the music here. Pool is a marker of an artist working at the top of their game, and its ambitious diversity signifies a necessary series of repeats before its grandeur becomes apparent.

Pool is a slow burn that launches off into the cosmos when you least expect it. Barring an extended lapse into sleepiness about twenty minutes in, there’s plenty here that rivals, if exceeds, Skee Mask’s best. “Testo BC Mashup” opens with dissonant radio voices before merging recognizable DnB patterns with a starlit smear, almost like an aural journey through the genre’s evolution. “Dolan Tours” highlights how good Skee Mask has gotten at breakbeat, rapidly changing forms as it pulses aquatically like the shadows of ripples on a cave wall. “Crossection” is essentially a classic blues riff retrofitted into a ghostly house context. Pool is stuffed full of similar variations and iterations of their signature house/breakbeat combo, laid out like a comprehensive dissertation.

Speaking of topography, Pool does consistently feature one of Skee Mask’s most notable talents: their ability to make something built from code sound wholly organic. Whether it’s “Stone Cold 369’s” verdant ambient river, the thin air of “Rio Dub’s” mountaintop, or the dark drizzly streets of “Absence,” Pool feels one with a diverse collection of locales. Maybe that’s why its cover art is so reminiscent of the works of another German ambient legend. Knowing homage or self-fulfilling prophecy, the nod emphasizes Skee Mask’s entrance into an echelon of electronic producers capable of balancing encyclopedic knowledge with deft execution.

Recommended for neurotransmitters.