Way back in 1996, the duo of Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig released this singles collection on the revered Chain Reaction label.  Over the ensuing years, it has justifiably been hailed as an inarguable dub techno classic, but it has remained maddeningly out-of-print for quite some time.  Now it is thankfully back again and it still sounds pretty amazing, which is a rather astonishing feat for cutting edge techno from almost two decades ago.  I'm a little disappointed that Type did not try to replicate (or outdo) the original, famously CD-damaging metal packaging though.
This is a fascinating album to try to deconstruct, as it often seems like a very abstract and boldly experimental effort that just happens to occasionally feature thumping four-on-the-floor beats.  I'm a bit conflicted on house beats in this instance, as I generally hate them with a fiery passion.  I definitely found myself annoyed by their blunt prominence in "Port of Call," but they are employed with tactful and ingenious restraint in most other instances.  In fact, the insistent pulsing is actually necessary to make music this uncompromisingly unmusical work.  This is most apparent in "Biokinetics 2," which closely resembles Köner's bleakly alienating and cavernous solo ambient work, but works a bit better due to its deep heart-like throb.  The genius of Biokinetics lies in how the beats sound, which is almost always distant and submerged.  In fact, the whole album sounds like it was recorded in a deep, dark trench in the ocean.  Or perhaps in a bubbling cauldron of molasses.  Those are both heartfelt compliments in this case, of course.
My clear favorite piece on the album is the tensely throbbing "Nautical Dub," which unleashes a very deep and insistently repeating bass line beneath a masterfully executed and shifting soundscape that sounds like a heavily processed rain storm mingled with stabs of hollow, ruined-sounding plonks.  I could listen to it forever.  There are a number of other pieces on Biokinetics that are more striking though, as Thomas and Andy took their music to some pretty outré places.
The most weird and dance-unfriendly of those pieces is probably "Biokinetics 1," which warps a synth bass line into a sick slow-motion burbling, dispenses with any kind of beat, and augments it only with a something that resembles a clanking, forlorn, pitch-shifted xylophone.  Then, later on the album, the duo spend two entire songs toying with a prominent rhythmic loop that constantly drifts in and out of phase with the very straightforward underlying beat: "Port of Nuba" sounds like a spirited ping-pong match unfolding over an otherwise bland, unremarkable bit of house music, then "Nautical Nuba" sounds like the exact same thing, but somehow underwater.
It is impossible to be unimpressed by the vision and singularity of Biokinetics, but it is a very difficult album to warm to or love in a non-cerebral way.  Its appeal lies primarily in how deftly and uniquely it uses minimalist repetition and studio technique to weave something wonderful out of the sparsest musical content.  "Nautical Dub" is brilliant, but none of the other pieces are quite on that level.  Some of them are pretty unusual, inventive, or ingeniously produced, but that is not quite the same thing as being great.
Also, there is an enormous amount of repetition here.  Within songs, I understand that that is largely the point: Köner and Mellwig were using obsessive repetition in service of achieving a cumulative slow-burning intensity.  Unfortunately, such intensity was not always the end result and some pieces drag a bit.  More significantly, however, Biokinetics is largely composed of song pairings: for example, "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" are essentially two versions of the exact same piece of music (and make up 25 minutes of the album).  It is certainly neat and enlightening to hear how the duo transform their base materials, but it also means that Biokinetics only contains five or six real songs.  That said, it was never intended as a coherent album, so it is a bit unfair to find fault with that (even though that is how I experienced it)–the important thing is that Biokinetics compiles some truly innovative and inspired work that turned out to be far more timeless than anyone could have anticipated.
Samples:
 
Read More
