Poland-born, Cologne-based Robert Babicz has been refining his dangerously effective, no-frills strain of techno since the '90s, with outings on Kompakt, Treibstoff and Bedrock to show for it. 

His new album, 'The Owl and the Butterfly' on Marc Romboy's Systematic Recordings, however, is inspired by communing with nature in Cologne’s Königsforest, and is largely an exercise in plumbing the basest components of new age: water sounds, birdsong, flute... all employed as proxies for feeling, man. 

Other artists have blended the pastoral and the synthetic — think Pantha du Prince romping in the Alps or Robag Wruhme’s Spreewald-inspired 'Thora Vukk', and here the concept is seen to work once again. 

The pulsating acid of ‘A Girl From Jupiter’ is layered with canned panpipes, the oceanic, roiling ‘Red Lips (Rob Neo Dub)’ thoroughly depressurised by a segue into one of the many ‘dream sequences’. Yup, ‘dream sequence’. That, friends, says it all.

Robert Babicz's 'The Owl and the Butterfly is out June 22 on Systematic Recordings'


01 Venus Transit

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