Long-time techno proponent Oscar Mulero is a fertile one, cooking up a new long-player here while some of us continue to plunder the musical trove that is last year’s sterling double-disc Grey Fades to Green. Here, you won’t find any of the mellow, Warp-inspired electronica on Green, as Mulero switches to what he calls a more “contemporary” and “modern” sound with crosshairs calibrated for the dancefloor.

What follows is a terse forty-minute spin of techno as grey and forbidding as the cover artwork itself, swathed in relentless lashings of his distinctive glacial reverb. Just sidle past the tired procedure of a beatless opening drone, and Mulero’s refined; rolling grooves will lead the rest of the way.

Yet you won’t be fully convinced till, um, ‘To Convince for the Untruth’ blitzes into hearing. Ramming the BPM up a few notches, the track’s incisive kicks clip along at mid-gear, betraying just enough groove for a big-room warm-up set. Occasional forays into pools of white noise and a smattering of taut undertones assist in building mood towards the absolute stormer that lies just ahead - ‘False Statements’.


Bracing, chastening and terribly grim at once, ‘False’ is Berghain tonnage techno pounding its way through ominous peals of synth. It’s a welcome dose of square-shot songwriting, and a positive step away from the beepy-extraterrestrial-Jeff Mills aesthetic that Mulero invested in over a stretch of feeble EPs.

One, then, can only wish for an eventual return to the sound that originally made Oscar Mulero such a colossal force in the scene: fearsome, no-bullshit, hard-as-nails technoid funk spawned direct from the bowels of darkness and industry.

Tracklist:
1. The Dirt
2. Instant Widespread Of The Dirt
3. Introducing Errors
4. Disinformation
5. To Convince For The Untruth
6. Intentionally False
7. Inaccurated Information
8. False Statements
9. Black Propaganda

http://www.juno.co.uk/products/black-propaganda/461351-01/
http://www.oscarmulero.com/