REITEN 0.008 by Kosei Fukuda

The eigth EP on REITEN continues and enriches the intense job of the seventh. It’s an uncompromisingly ghostly techno that borders on psy-trance intensity. “Cosmic Loop (The Message)” has a paranoid loop at its heart that serves as the incessant backdrop for distorted voices blurting out their cryptic ‘cosmic’ messages. There’s something disconcerting about this combination, superimposed as it is on the steady undifferentiated beat. “Cosmic Gate” extends this pattern, stretching out the voice-like sounds beyond recognition where they morph into distant wails, signals, squeaks and sonic phantoms.

No doubt, it’s a spaced out music where a mechanical repetition anchors, as it were, an atmospheric randomness. It is a radically stripped down dance music, reduced to most functional skeletal parts, whose beat signifies the frantic speed at which one must move to reach any ‘cosmic gate’ worth its name, and whose slow-motion aural background hints at those gates’ enormity. Where does this particular techno trajectory leads us to?

The last cut on the EP titled “From Nothingness” is an attempt at a concluding answer. If techno loops are perfect symbols of eternity and cyclical nature of cosmic movements, Kosei Fukuda’s ambient palette evokes a sense of nothingness in which all the things seem inevitably suspended. Here sounds are just echoes and shadows and stretched out versions of themselves rather than recognizable bits and pieces of a message or a theme. The beat remains as tight and eternal as ever, while the background noises float around, appearing ‘ex nihilo’ and disappearing without warning.

This is a sonic world where melody is extinct and the rhythm reigns supreme, a universe which is dark but only in a way that the infinite space of cosmos is dark. Its blackness is always being dotted with a myriad of light sources and effects. “Cosmic Loop” comes across as a sonic image – or a message – evoking such a space, or a weirdness of an experience of cosmic space; a club music with no other purpose than to create ample room for an interpreter who searches for multiple meanings in singular form, and who is willing to dock into its pure pulse for longer.


Dominik Bartmanski
Berlin, June 2020