Reeko

Continuing the trajectory set by last year's EPs and experimental
long-player, Reeko returns to Samurai Music to deliver an
expansive album that goes further into his experimental practice at
the intersection of deep techno, drum & bass and electronica.
Since the early 00s Juan Rico has been applying his exacting
vision to the deeper end of dance music culture. As Reeko, he's
carved out an imposing presence in the modern techno scene by
building up the steely, hard-hitting sound of Mental Disorder while
also contributing to scene-leading labels like Modularz, Semantica
and Delsin. With a trio of releases through 2024 for Samurai
Music, the Spanish producer demonstrated the wider scope of his
craft as he opened up to broken rhythms, spacious arrangements
and a wholly different dimension to his music-making.
On Cryptophony, Rico continues this thread of exploration and
uses the concept of inaudible or encrypted sounds as an
inspirational jump-off point for an incredibly detailed, nuanced
body of work. When meditative minimalism and insistent repetition
are key compositional tools, the sound field is opened up for
subtlety in the spaces between notes, and that's precisely the
experience Rico has crafted across seven extended pieces.
"Crytophony explores how sound can conceal, suggest or reveal
information in a symbolic, sensory or ritualistic way," Rico explains.
"I found it interesting as a first step to investigate further. There are
no hidden messages in the music, but there are strange voices
that, after the final process, sound transformed."
Not everything is subliminal and subversive within Rico's artistic
vision on the album. Among the sparse framework of cyclical
rhythms, tracks like 'El Cielo Liquido' move through vaporous
atmospheric tension to find the comforting anchor of a fluid 303
line, while 'Retumbra' revels into the half-double-time interplay of
arpeggios and staggered kicks as layers of ruthlessly reduced acid
bubble into a potent, transcendental broth. 'Frequencias Parricidas'
settles on a low, chugging 4/4 throb as a sturdy, danceable vessel
for uneasy brushstrokes of sound design from the post-punk
school of murky abstraction.
'Ecos De Suburbio' and the first two 'Sequencia Criptofonica'
pieces share a similar line in sleek, precision engineered beats
coursing through dense tonal clouds, until the final part shears
away the footholds and lets pure textural design take the lead for a
captivating ambient conclusion. It's the perfect closing gesture on
an album where you can hear so much of the music in the spaces
between the dominant, rhythmic sounds, if you allow yourself the
presence of mind to listen closely.