With a string of EPs on labels like Connaisseur, Perspektiv, Plak and, with his former duo project Lazy Fat People, Border Community, Switzerland's Raphaël Ripperton understands club music inside and out. On his debut album, you might say that he turns it inside out. Working with the spiraling arpeggios and looped phrases of minimal techno, Ripperton swaps out club music's more emphatic elements — the hard edged drums, the buzzing synthesizers, the hyper-compressed dynamic range — in favor of a softer, more yielding electro-acoustic palette. Sampled acoustic percussion, analog drum machines and finely honed digital clicks are finessed into trim, focused grooves; the urgent waveforms of Detroit techno are muted and merged with layers of bell tones, Rhodes keyboards, guitar (played by Germain Umdenstock) and field recordings. The music suits the instrumentation, with ruminative chord changes augmented by harmonies so faint that they're practically implied, gestural. The Berlin-based vocalist Christina Wheeler lays out long melodic lines on "At Peace" and "Solastalgia," and uncredited vocals imbue many of the songs with a sense of presence, warm breath and wordless tones putting flesh on skeletal percussive structures.

The record is similar in feel to the music of Lawrence, Pantha du Prince and… read more »