??? (Robert) is another pseudonym for Robert Yang, also known as Bézier, who is becoming one of 1051 Magazine’s favourite emerging artists.
The intelligent techno DJ and producer, a San Francisco native who straddles Berlin and California, first came to prominence as part of Honey Soundsystem, a gay music collective that made a name for itself in the San Francisco underground scene.
A virtuoso of synthesizers, he is a precise artist, a musician who leaves an indelible stamp on each and every one of his productions.
Lexicon is the title of his second album, released on his own label, Piece Of Work, and each of its tracks is a particular journey into unknown territories that Robert presents with mathematical and almost surgical efficiency.
The current definition of intelligent Techno could not find a better sonic expression than this work by the Californian musician. But it is also true that sometimes labelling his creations is a futile effort, because his capacity for surprise transcends the frontiers of these definitions of styles. Nothing better than to take the track that opens the album and gives it its title. Lexicon begins with a rhythmic pattern perhaps too groovy for Techno purists, and then enters into oriental effluvia and is returned to Techno terrain with light Acid traces. All this in just over seven and a half minutes. Welcome to the airlines ???
The second track is Flutter, which like the next one, Enconding, can be framed much more within the IDM space. Later come two shorter tracks, Assimilate and Inhalation, the latter with a complex loop that gives it a peculiar identity. Transpose is a trip back in time that takes you to sounds and rhythms used by pioneers of electronic music in the frontier between the seventies and eighties of the last century… and almost hand in hand with this trip appears the following track, Pseudonym, dark, intense.
To close Exaltation, another explosion of analogue sounds and references to other times.
We still think that Robert Yang’s career should be followed closely. His particular vision of music brings us diversity in times when this is sometimes missing.
You can purchase this album here
