Brand new album - and fresh new sonic approach - from Metroline Records co-founder and veteran minimal techno producer Phiorio.

In a world - and an era - of much uncertainty and restriction, Phiorio took a step sideways, looking away from the somewhat rigid ‘rules’ of electronic club music - the prescribed BPMs, the restrictive palette of sounds, the universally agreed formula of minimal techno - to produce his most personal and surprising work in years.

A bold new freedom was acquired in discarding the safety net of structural familiarity - the cold surgical steel of precision-made techno is here replaced with more atmospheric, woozy and smudged aesthetic. There’s still percussion, but of a looser, more organic, less mechanistic flavour. The music is still propulsive, but not so much a futuristic shining chromium monorail, more of a late-night drive, an automotive drift through an unlit and slightly foreboding landscape.

Nocturnal melodies, half-recalled memories, late night visions, cold sweats - The Perpetual Self Doubt is an enigmatic fever dream populated by fluttering synths, corporeal basslines, wraithlike half-heard voices, ghost drones, miasmic echoes and ambiguous atmospheres.

In a similar manner to antecedents Drexciya with their aquatic afrofuturist aesthetic or Wolfgang Voigt’s GASeous frozen Bavarian forests, Phiorio – for all his self-deprecating self-doubt – has impressively and confidently created his own sonic universe, his own cinema-of-the-mind, an intimate and singular authorial voice.

It is at times a disquieting and eerie journey to embark upon, but it is a journey you’ll want to take again and again, hearing (and possibly hallucinating) new facets and details with every listen.

01 - Doubt

Phiorio