Feeling >

Trim, Soul Food Volume 3. For someone who seems to be in perpetual crisis about whether he should MC or not, his work is always fresh as a daisy. Perhaps that's the reason...

Flying Lotus album. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking the hype had got rather out of hand, but this is genuinely some inside-out hiphop shizznizz.

Theo Parrish's Sound Sculptures Volume 1. Nominally house music, but these never quite interlocking beats are almost like Timbaland on a tapesplice binge. Some of the weirdest, most extenuated grooves I've heard for a while.

Kind of feeling > Religious Knives' album. Not the usual noise-stuff from the No Fun label, but a nasty-er, more barbed version of the Velvet Underground circa White Light, with scaborous, caustic guitar drone distortion which sounds like plastic flakes are falling off the tape reel.

Really feeling > Thomas Brinkmann's work passim. The new album is entirely techno-less, sort of like Tom Waits doing an album with Suicide at points, given the prevalence of his gravelly vocals and primitive synth pulses. But rewind through his recent albums, and each of them is radically different. Klick Revolution is an extraordinary piece of degraded techno, which feels like the beats are falling apart- William Basinski eat your heart out. Lucky Hands is more Matthew Dear-ish, with lots of vocals and hooks that tear into your skin. Techno's arch conceptualist, Brinkmann's work sets a different agenda for himself and techno as a whole at every turn.

Not really feeling > The couple of recent sets I've caught with The Bug. OK, his MCs are pretty rocking, but its somehow a little sad to hear Flo Dan and Warrior Queen's old lyrics represented over new beats, which for my money lose some of the quirky freshness of, say, those Roll Deep and Sunship productions which these two used to rhyme over. If feels like a repackaging.

As I grow older, the question of exactly WHY I like particular musics gets increasingly important – sort of a mid-life crisis, but I really see it in a positive light, a re-evaluation of values kind of thing. It makes me wonder why I like minimal techno quite so much- is it more than just fascination with textures, a kind of textural play not so different from electroacoustic music?

Minimal techno is not really an expressive or representational art. With its lack of vocals, and heavily processed nature, it feels like a plastic artform: the sound is malleable, but also varies only within certain limits, where much of the sounds are in the same ballpark. The thrill of something like Villalobos's mix of "Blood On My Hands" by Shackleton is the way it overlaps itself, folds itself up. It seeks to stretch the forms of perception, really, to disrupt the sense of time: it becomes techno operating on a formal level, rather than a simply textural one.

The minimalist impulse is often the fascination with the purely plastic nature of an artform. But there's another side to minimalism: a kind of ideology, an intellectual cleanliness, a wish to avoid clutter and waste. This makes sense with architecture, but rarely with music, when there's not the same issue of scarcity in the first place. On the contrary, minimalism in music often feels like a conceit: think of all those laptoppers with minimalist tones, a music genre which is perhaps the preserve of those with money and perfectly formed lifestyles. There's nothing gambled by making/consuming minimal techno, there's nothing at stake. Sound is too plentiful for the minimalism to constitute a real choice.

And yet, the beauty of it can something be a statement of sorts. The way it creates a self contained world, with very little sense of jazziness, very little of the swing of the human touch, just the feeling of the circuits playing themselves. Its sense of space is often exhilarating. The sounds are like an abstract tableaux one can appreciate at close up or from far away: it's a scaleable music, it can immerse you, make you loose your bearings (and thus doesn't really seem minimal at all). This sense of loosing your bearings, of being consumed, one rarely achieves with music, and is one reason minimal techno is special.