In this third instalment for Tresor Records’ Kern mix-series, Berlin based DJ/producer Objekt endeavours to consolidate the haphazard kinetics of a live performance with the nuanced discipline of studio recordings. Making use of “old and new techniques alike,” he suggests.

The frenzied balance of styles and BPMs flits freely from breakbeats to techno to IDM with the kind of thrilling confidence – cockiness, even
– that Objekt’s peak-time sets have become known for. Yet the decisive blending from track to track is so fine tuned, that Kern Vol.3 carries itself with a certain clearheadedness.

Comparatively, this is potentially the most unruly of all Kern releases to date. The audacity to align an exclusive preview from Bristol’s Shanti Celeste alongside the melancholic vocal abstractions of Anna Caragnano, or to nestle Ondo Fudd’s Blue Dot with the minatory drone of Yair Elazar Glotman’s Oratio Continua (Part 1) is quite simply abnormal.

This is Objekt’s first offering since his debut album Flatland was released on PAN in 2014; a record that seemed to vicariously hover over concentrated techno production and experimental avant-gardism. It was by no means a total rejection of techno’s framework, but rather an explorative reformation of what it is capable of. Here, Hertz moulds other artists’ work to accommodate with this equilibrium of exploration and tradition, with Kern Vol. 3 whittling together a confounding miscellany of off-kilter rarities and vintage techno movers

Tom Watson