STL - Illumination (2022)

That's why, we can affirm that the sub genre called "Dub Techno" is pushed here to a new standard, making it another subgenre that is maybe as far from dubtechno or from any other genre. Take, for instance "Ocean", a key track of this lp (but similar findings can be made about most of the album's tracks) surely has certains "sounds" in common with the original Maurizio stuff, but that's all and that's it. What Maurizio brought to techno back in 1995 was an essential and historic step for sure. Then an historic amount of attempts have been done to get this sound to the next level and 99% of them have failed and could not even get close to their ideal. It's possibly because their only aim was to get close to that model. And that's not what Stephan seems to be doing, definitely not. While Maurizio's sound is all about short loops' repetitive perfection - concerning M4, M4.5, M6 mostly, and maybe even truer concerning M4.5 - Stephan succeeds in a quite different way. Indeed, he surely doesn't bet on the perfection of his loop's content in itself nor his potentially high hypnotic power, but rather turns a quite sober and simple loop - which is already powerful in itself - into a highly detailed and extended recording, a musical landscape that won't have revealed all it's mysteries after a thousands listens.