Barnt Writes an Album, Not a Set of Tools

After Completing the Hex arrives on Magazine and does the difficult thing: it works as a record while the individual tracks still function in a club. Those two goals usually pull against each other, because a track built to be mixed is built to be interchangeable, and twelve interchangeable things in sequence is not an album. Barnt has always made techno that sidesteps the obvious moment. The music is unpredictable in a specific way, holding a strange idea long enough for it to stop sounding like a mistake and start sounding like the point. That requires giving up the easy win on every track, which is why so few producers attempt it. Magazine has backed exactly this kind of work for years. A label that only releases what its audience already approves of stops being a label and becomes a distributor, and the catalogues that still matter a decade later are the ones that occasionally risked losing people. Give it two listens. Records written as architecture sound aimless when skimmed and obvious in retrospect, and everything interesting about them lives in the distance between those two reactions.

Label: Magazine.